Gamers floored after realising what ‘Nintendo’ actually means

Nintendo has been in the game for a whopping 135 years, but it’s only now that fans are clocking onto the possible meaning behind the company’s iconic name.

Way back in 1889, craftsman Fusajiro Yamauchi started the company by making handmade hanafuda or ‘flower cards’ in Japan.

It wasn’t until the 1970s that the company released its first console, the Color TV-Game. But it was 80s releases like Donkey Kong, the Nintendo Entertainment System and Super Mario Bros that really put them on the map.

As of March 2023, the company had flogged over 5.592billion video games and shifted more than 836million hardware units worldwide. But despite being on everyone’s lips for years, loads of people haven’t got a clue about the origins of the name ‘Nintendo’.

It is assumed the word Nintendo means something akin to “leave luck to heaven”, although it is worth noting there is no official record of what the original founder actually meant. According to Playbite, this name represents Yamauchi’s philosophy towards business and life.

The site states: “By entrusting fate to the higher powers, Nintendo embarked on a journey that would eventually revolutionise the gaming world. The name symbolises faith in destiny, an ethos that seems to have guided Nintendo through its evolution from a small playing card company to a titan of the video game industry.”

Someone claiming to live in Tokyo, and clearly possessing a decent understanding of the Japanese language, took to Quora to explain how the word translates into English to get something like “leave luck to heaven”.

They wrote: “The kanji [characters] used for Nintendo [in Japanese] are 任天堂.

“堂/Do means ‘the house of…’ and is a common suffix for companies. 任 means ‘to entrust’, and 天 means ‘heaven’. Thus, these two put together mean ‘entrust the heavens’ or ‘entrust God’ or ‘leave it to God’.

“Given that Nintendo started by producing cards used for gambling or games of chance, you can add luck into the connotation – ‘entrust God with your luck’ or ‘trust God with your fate’ or something like that.”

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