Gluemeat

This may come as a shock to some of you who aren’t up-and-up on your gamer lore, but Nintendo hasn’t always been about mushroom-popping plumbers and androgynous elf-like warriors. In fact, the company’s origins date back to the late XIXth century as a producer of hand-made hanafuda playing cards. Yes, just regular, run-of-the-mill playing cards.

After trying its hand at producing many different products (such as vacuums and taxi companies), Nintendo settled into toymaking, churning out all sorts of great little goodies for great little Japanese boys and girls. And one lucky toy collector has accumulated a little hoard of these rare pieces of Nintendo memorabilia, all of which pre-date the big arcade era which would define Nintendo till this very day. It’s quite a fascinating exhibit.
Oh, and those of you who are familiar with the Wario Ware series of games will recognise the Custom Gunman and the Ultra Hand toys, both of which are proudly brandished in their respective micro-games.

(Via Joystiq)

This entry was posted by Mike on Thursday, October 12th, 2006 at 4:03 pm and is filed under Awesomeness. Stay fresh on your flaming needs by following responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave your own response, or trackback from your own site. YEAH