Long before “Nintendo” became a household name in video games, it was once a company that produced playing cards. Founded in September 1889 as “Nintendo Koppai” by Fusajiro Yamauchi, it manufactured Hanafuda cards – playing cards that could be used for a number of different games. The company started making western-style playing cards in the early twentieth century. Mr. Yamauchi’s grandson, Hiroshi Yamauchi (coincidentally, this September marks the sixth anniversary of his death) who took over the company in the 1950s, became the first to mass-produce plastic playing cards in Japan.   Fast forward to the 1960s and 1970, and the Nintendo Company, Ltd., begins producing games and starts experimenting in electronics technology. Nintendo’s first arcade game is released in the late 1970s, and in 1980, the world starts seeing the first “Game & Watch” products. After that, well…you likely know how the rest of the story goes.

History lessons aside, we here at Virtual Bastion all are life-long Nintendo fans and players, so we thought it would be fun and fitting to celebrate Nintendo’s 130^th anniversary this September with a month of Nintendo-themed posts! Unofficially dubbed #NintendoSeptember, each week we’ll each be offering posts dedicated to a particular Nintendo-based theme: favorite game [week 1], favorite music [week 2], favorite character(s) [week 3], and favorite memories [week 4]. We hope you’ll follow along and share your own Nintendo stories. Nintendo forever shaped our gaming landscape, and as we see every year, its innovations just keep coming.

So here’s to another 130 years, Nintendo! Our #NintendoSeptember kicks off on September 1^st.

Lede image from Flickr user SteamXO (All characters depicted © Nintendo Co. Ltd.)