Here’s one that breaks people’s brains a little. The company that gave you Mario, Zelda, and the Nintendo Switch is older than sliced bread. Not by a few months. By 38 years.
Say it out loud and it sounds like a joke. It isn’t. The math is real, and it’s wonderful.
A card shop in Kyoto, 1889
Nintendo didn’t start with pixels or plumbers. It started with a craftsman named Fusajiro Yamauchi, and a small shop in Kyoto, Japan.
The date was September 23, 1889. Yamauchi began making a kind of Japanese playing card called hanafuda, which translates to “flower cards.” These weren’t factory-stamped decks. Each card was made by hand, the images pressed onto paper made from the bark of the mulberry tree, then colored. Slow, careful, beautiful work.
The name he eventually gave the company was Nintendo. People love to say it means “leave luck to heaven,” and that’s the reading most often repeated, though even Nintendo has admitted the true origin is a bit fuzzy. Fitting, really, for a company that would spend the next century in the business of luck and play.
Now, here’s the part nobody expects. Those pretty flower cards had a reputation.
The cards had a shady side
Regular playing cards had been banned in Japan for long stretches, so hanafuda became the workaround for people who wanted to gamble. Yamauchi’s cards ended up on the tables of gambling parlors across the country. The company that would one day be the wholesome face of family game night got its first real money from the backrooms where people bet on flowers.
Nintendo sold cards, and only cards, for a very long time. Decades. It wasn’t until the 1960s and beyond that the company started flailing around for a new identity, trying everything from a taxi service to instant rice to a chain of “love hotels” before it finally stumbled into toys, then electronics, then video games. Mario didn’t show up until 1981. The company was already 92 years old by then.
But hold that thought and rewind, because we still haven’t gotten to the bread.
Meanwhile, bread came in one piece
For all of human history, bread came as a loaf. You wanted a slice, you got out a knife and you cut it yourself, crooked and uneven, and that was simply how bread worked. Nobody thought there was a problem to solve.
One man did. His name was Otto Frederick Rohwedder, an American jeweler turned inventor, and he became quietly obsessed with building a machine that could slice a whole loaf at once. It took him years. A fire destroyed his prototype and his blueprints along the way. Bakers he pitched it to weren’t interested, insisting a pre-sliced loaf would just go stale and fall apart on the shelf.
He kept at it anyway. And on July 7, 1928, in the small town of Chillicothe, Missouri, the Chillicothe Baking Company ran the first loaves through Rohwedder’s machine and put sliced bread on sale to the public for the very first time.
That’s the birthday of sliced bread. 1928.
Do the math
Nintendo: 1889.
Sliced bread: 1928.
That’s a 38-year head start. When the good people of Chillicothe bought the first loaf of pre-sliced bread in the summer of 1928, Nintendo had already been in business for almost four decades, quietly printing flower cards in Kyoto.
Think about the sheer stretch of history the company has lived through. When Nintendo opened its doors, the Eiffel Tower was brand new. Cars were a rich man’s curiosity. There were no commercial airplanes, no radio broadcasts, no television. Two world wars hadn’t happened yet. And this little Japanese card maker was already up and running, and it’s still running today, selling one of the most popular game consoles on the planet.
We even measure human progress against bread. “The greatest thing since sliced bread,” we say, as if 1928 were the dawn of all convenience. Meanwhile the company behind your childhood was already middle-aged by then.
So the next time someone calls an idea the greatest thing since sliced bread, you get to smile and drop the fact that Nintendo would like a word. It was here first. By 38 years.
