1 Ultra Hand Nintendo''s prehistory, from playing cards to Love Testers It was a time of great fun . I saw myself as a cartoonist who understood movements in the world and created abstractions of them. Gunpei Yokoi on Nintendo''s early days, from David Sheff''s Game Over In a garden in Alsace, France, rather out of place among the modern housing that surrounds it, sits an exact replica of a Japanese building from 1889. Outside, a small bamboo fountain trickles quietly, and the red leaves of a miniature Japanese maple frame the door. Above the threshold are three kanji: -Nin-ten-do. Inside is a low table on a bamboo floor, a desk in the corner, and--an incredible sight--shelves and shelves of irreplaceable Nintendo history; not consoles and carts, figures and toys and curios, though there are a few of those, too, but instead hundreds of packs of playing cards, catalogs, signage, and advertisements torn from the pages of old magazines. This building, reconstructed from photos of Nintendo''s very first shop front in Kyoto, Japan, is the passion project of Nintendo collector Fabrice Heilig, and it houses an extraordinary collection of Nintendo history, some of it more than a hundred years old. Before it became the house of Mario, Nintendo began life in the late 1890s manufacturing and selling flower-adorned hanafuda playing cards out of a small workshop just like this.

There are precious few photographs of this original Nintendo headquarters, which was located between the Shosei-en Garden and the western bank of the Kamo River, across the water from the city''s tourist-mobbed temples. Fabrice calculated the height of the building from the relative height of the local landmarks that can be seen in the background of those photos, and asked someone in Kyoto to physically go and measure the place where the shop once stood. After finding a perfect source for the style of the era, he imported the tiles and woodwork from Japan and found a carpenter who shared his excitement about the project. Construction took ten months. "Like many collectors, I''m very familiar with the space restrictions that crop up sooner or later," Fabrice tells me. "When my own collection started to pile up, I was looking for a solution to highlight it better. So I came up with the idea of building a little annex specially dedicated to my collection. When I was perusing some photos of one of Nintendo''s first wooden buildings in Kyoto, which was sadly destroyed in 2004 because it was too old, I was inspired.

Why not perfectly reconstruct the facade of this famous wooden building, which didn''t exist anymore? This reconstruction could also give more meaning to the cards that would be exhibited there . During construction, there was always that small fear that it wouldn''t look like I hoped, that it wouldn''t have that old traditional Japanese spirit reminiscent of the era of Nintendo''s card games. But it all turned out well in the end." Fabrice says that his neighbors and friends were a little taken aback at first, even though they were all well acquainted with his fondness for Japan. "Looking at it, all they saw was a small Japanese-style house," he says. "But after I explained exactly what this building was and its history, people were pleasantly surprised. Plenty of them had no idea about Nintendo''s long history outside of the Zelda and Mario games." Two unofficial items in his collection are a source of particular pride: the heavy green-and-gold plaques that sit on one of Fabrice''s shelves.

They are replicas of the iconic plaques that you can find outside the door of Nintendo''s second headquarters in Kyoto''s Kagiyacho district, now a luxury hotel called Marufukuro that contains its own small library of early Nintendo history. He had them re-created precisely from 15-pound blocks of aluminum using a specialist machine, then had them painted. Underneath the words toranpu and karuta--two Japanese words for Western playing cards--appears , Nintendo Yamauchi. The origins of this name are lost to time--even Nintendo''s own historians don''t know its precise meaning, and the kanji characters carry varied connotations--but one plausible theory is that the word derives from the phrase un o ten ni makaseru, meaning "leave luck to heaven." Nintendo''s founder was entrepreneur Fusajiro Yamauchi, a keen cardplayer who started the company to make handcrafted hanafuda--small, rectangular, hard tiles made from wood, cardboard, and paper and illustrated with animals, flowers, and objects, used in several different games. Hanafuda were, at the time, closely associated with gambling and, therefore, with organized crime; the very word yakuza, the Japanese for "gangster," derives from a losing hanafuda hand. Playing cards had been more or less banned throughout the Edo period from 1603 to 1868, but authorities in the following Meiji period had softened toward them, which allowed Yamauchi''s business to take off. Watada, another small Kyoto company, once printed playing cards for Nintendo, and to this day it still prints its catalogs and game boxes.

Nintendo also still makes hanafuda, though these days you might see Mario, Yoshi, or Kirby depicted on their little tiles, wreathed in flowers. Perhaps the bright, organic iconography of Mario''s early adventures, the Fire Flowers and Piranha Plants, the stars and coins and mushrooms, owe something to these relics of Nintendo''s 1800s history. In 1902, Nintendo became the first Japanese company to make Western-style playing cards, known as trump decks (though they had nothing to do with Top Trumps). Over the next few decades it branched out into iroha karuta, decks of images and letters that helped kids learn the Japanese phonetic alphabets, katakana and hiragana, through syllable-matching games. Nintendo made hyakunin isshu decks, too, a Japanese card game where players must race to match the beginnings of short poems with the endings, on cards decorated with images of the poets themselves. During the 1940s, as part of the Japanese government''s national propaganda program, Nintendo produced a patriotic version of this card game that replaced some of the poems with more nationalist material--these are some of the most historically interesting decks in Fabrice''s collection. Housed in glass cases in the interior of Fabrice''s building, there are particularly old and rare sets of cards, including one decorated with pinup models. Cuttings from old newspapers and documents that mention Nintendo are tucked away in black binders.

The oldest Nintendo advertisement in Fabrice''s collection is from 1904, and he has a few highly sought-after sample catalogs of cards, thick and brightly decorated books that would have been brought out in front of potential customers by Nintendo''s traveling salesmen when they were selling to retailers across Japan. The hardest thing about collecting these pieces of Nintendo history, he says, is the need for patience: Without it, the oldest and rarest cards are not easy to get hold of. Fabrice has plenty of Nintendo games and toys, too, of course--those still live in his cellar. But it''s the playing cards that are his specialty, and he has, he thinks, the largest collection of them in the world. "At the start I collected everything to do with video games," he says. "But a few years in, I decided to focus in on one brand, the one that had the biggest impact on me in my youth, and so I landed on Nintendo. I wanted to know what Nintendo had done before video games. At the time there wasn''t much information about that online--so when I made the discovery that Nintendo had made playing cards and games, I was fascinated.

I''ve always wanted to know more about the origins of the company. I concentrate on the playing cards in particular because, for me, those represent Nintendo''s foundations." Nintendo''s beginnings as a card game company locate it on a continuum of play that stretches right back through human history. For as long as humans have lived together, on every continent and in every culture, we have had games. Archaeologists have found dice made from bone and board games with painted figures dating back five thousand years, and game boards scratched into the sides of ancient buildings. The earliest examples of card games that we''ve found come from ninth-century China, when woodblock printing became a widespread technology. From there they spread to Egypt, where the oldest surviving decks of cards--dating from the fifteenth century--were discovered in 1939, and then on to Europe. The Portuguese would introduce playing cards to Japan in the 1500s.

As part of human civilization, games have connected us socially, told us stories about our past and our culture, and given us an opportunity to exercise our extraordinary brains. They have been bridges between cultures and vehicles for imagination and invention, and a vector for the evolution of language. Video games still do all of this. Nintendo''s hanafuda history might not seem especially relevant to where it is today, but traditional games form the backdrop to the history of video games. That history didn''t begin in the 1950s, when the first computer scientists at universities started coding to entertain themselves and their colleagues on hulking mainframes; it stretches all the way back through card games, chess, and senet to the most primitive technologies of sticks and stones. What makes a game a game isn''t just its form and its rules; it''s the players. Without human imagination and competition, any game, from hanafuda to Halo, is inert. Fusajiro Yamauchi''s son-in-law, who was adopted into.