What Do Baseball, Playing Cards & Love Hotels Have In Common?
Answer: Nintendo had or still has a hand in each of these areas.

According to wikipedia.com, in 1889 (yes, that’s the 1800′s), Nintendo produced hanafuda playing cards, which are used for a Japanese card game. The photo below shows what the hanafuda cards look like. The object of the game is to accumulate more points than the other players.

As far as baseball goes, Nintendo is a majority owner of the Major League Baseball team the Seattle Mariners, who knew!

Love hotels…? Uhh, I won’t even touch that topic.
I will say that between 1963 and 1968, Nintendo setup a love hotel chain, a taxi company, and several other things. All of these ventures eventually failed.

Ok, this is where Nintendo first came into my life. Most everyone has heard about the Nintendo Wii by now and maybe even the Nintendo DS (the little pocket size game consoles), but I bet not many people have heard about the Nintendo Game & Watch games. The Game & Watch as the name implies was a game and a watch in one pocket sized package. The name “watch” is a bit misleading because you didn’t strap this thing on your wrist, but it had a clock built into it so you could see how much time you’re wasting trying to beat the game.

The Game & Watch first appeared on the market in 1980. If it looks like the modern day original Nintendo DS that was released in 2004, that’s probably because the DS was fashioned after the Game & Watch units.

My mother traveled to Japan for vacation back in the ’80s and she had brought me back 2 of the Nintendo Game & Watch consoles. One was Donkey Kong and the other was a Popeye game. I tended to play the Donkey Kong game more, because of the expanded screen real estate, due to it’s duel screens, the Popeye game only had one.

After all these years, I still own both of the Game & Watch consoles and they are still in great condition, but I haven’t played with either of them for quite a while! I guess I’m just hanging on to the memories.

For much more details on the Game & Watch, visit wikipedia.com:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_%26_Watch

For more details about Nintendo’s other endeavors, please visit wikipedia.com at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo