Nintendo is officially 137 years old today, and while that’s an odd number to celebrate, it’s certainly an impressive one. While it’s a leading producer of video games and gaming hardware, the company originally started life as a maker of hanafuda playing cards in 1889, evolving with the times to eventually become a gaming powerhouse. But to put its age into perspective, it’s worth looking at things that Nintendo predates.
That makes for a long list, but the biggest surprise, as pointed out online, is that Nintendo is literally older than sliced bread. Technically, this would make sliced bread the best thing since Nintendo, and for double-technicality points, we’re referring to commercial pre-sliced bread. According to the history books, pre-sliced bread made its commercial debut 38 years later, on July 7, 1928, when the Missouri-based Chillicothe Baking Company began using Otto Frederick Rohwedder’s bread-slicing machine to deliver tasty portions of the household staple to customers.
Historically, Nintendo also beat the public opening of the Eiffel Tower (June 1893) and the Wright Brothers’ first flight (1903), and it outlasted the Ottoman Empire. It also has a big lead on the invention of penicillin (1928), chocolate chip cookies (1938), bubble wrap (1957), and the greatest movie of all time, Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim (2013). If there’s anything that equals the historical significance of Nintendo, that would be Vincent Van Gogh’s iconic Starry Night painting, which was created the same year that Nintendo was formed.
Today, Nintendo is worth many billions of dollars thanks to the release of several highly successful consoles, including the Wii and the Switch. In recent years, it has also intensified its efforts to be more than just a video game company, launching new theme parks and slowly releasing more feature film adaptations based on its original IP.
The two Super Mario Bros. movies developed by Illumination have each grossed north of $1 billion at the box office, and the next project is a live-action Legend of Zelda movie.