Nintendo playing cards

When Nintendo was established, president Fusajiro Yamauchi began his company by manufacturing high quality Hanaufda cards. Since then, Nintendo has been very associated with the card making business, even today with their involvement in the Pokémon Trading Card Game.

History
Card games picked up in Japan after Portuguese-based ships brought them to the country. After the Japanese government began to worry about Christian missionaries from Europe, they banned anything that had originated from Western cultures, including card games. The Japanese tried to find away around this ban by producing Hanafuda cards, which had the twelve seasons replacing the numbers/jack/queen/king present in card games. While this worked for a short time, the government would eventually ban these too. Thankfully in the eighteen hundreds, this ban was lifted. Fusajiro Yamauchi, who played card games illegally, was thrilled by this and was thankful that he could now pursue his hobby legally, and soon enough opened up a business called Nintendo that would produce handmande Hanafuda cards.

His business flourished, and his cards were among the most popular in all the country. When Nintendo became very popular, the company would attempt to spread out into other industries, though for the most part failed. Their card business, however, always proved itself, which led them to produce different types of cards outside of just Hanafuda. These cards included both Japanese types (such as Karuta and Hyakunin) and Western types. Nintendo would also develop original card games such as one set that involved magic tricks.

Hiroshi Yamauchi, who had visited the United States Playing Card Company (the largest card company in the world at the time) in search of a way to operate his business better, came back to Japan shocked that the US Playing Card Company was actually of a similar size to Nintendo's. The most successful card games that Nintendo produced were licensed cards. In a separate visit to the United States, Yamauchi visited the Walt Disney Company in hopes of gaining the Disney license. He did so successfully. After producing Disney-themed cards (and airing their first television commercial, which featured the cards), Nintendo's profits tripled, allowing them to become a part of both the Kyoto and Osaka Stock Exchange.