Nintendo, 1889
"In 1889 (Meiji 22), Fusajiro Yamauchi began manufacturing hanafuda playing cards in Shimogyo Ward, Kyoto." That is the first line of the company's own history. The shop was named Nintendo Koppai — koppai meaning playing cards of the karuta kind. Fusajiro also dealt in lime, and that trade dates to 1885, four years earlier than hanafuda. I could not find a source that states outright which was the main business and which the side business — some summaries claim one or the other, but I could not trace them back to a source — so this map lists the two side by side without deciding. The next line of the company history reads: "In 1902 (Meiji 35), the company began manufacturing Japan's first Western-style playing cards." The same year hanafuda became taxed. One reading: taxation pushed the domestic production of what had been an imported good. Then in 1965, an engineer who had been watching the hanafuda assembly line caught the company president's eye with a toy of his own making. Gunpei Yokoi. His "lateral thinking with withered technology" gave rise to the Game & Watch and the Game Boy. A card trade that was banned, disguised, taxed, and still kept being played — today's games stand on the far side of that. This one company's timeline is the watershed of the whole archipelago of play.