A Look At Some Of The Products Nintendo Was Making Before They Made Video Games
Long before Nintendo became the video game titan it is today, it was making various games (electronic and otherwise) to entertain people. Founded in 1889 as a producer of Japanese playing cards, Nintendo has been serving up fun for over 100 years now, and has produced it's fair share of unique items along the way.
Redditor ZadocPaet has been buying some vintage Nintendo products off eBay, and recently decided to share some of his collection.
Playing Cards
Now these aren't the original cards from 1889 (duh) but Nintendo continued to make playing cards into the 20th century.
Chaotic Cube (1970)
According to ZadocPaet,
"Chaotic Cube was released in the United States in 1970. It was licensed by the Pacific Game Company from Nintendo, who had released it a year earlier in Japan as Challenge Dice. It was also known as Puzzle Dice."
Similar to many of today's brain teasers, the Chaotic Cube was a puzzle box that needed to be put back in a specific way.
Duck Hunt Kosenju (1976)
The hugely popular "Duck Hunt" game (and associated zapper) for the NES wasn't actually the first iteration of the game. This rare release came out in Japan in 1976. Battery and light powered, this version of the game used a small, moving projector and lens to cast ducks along a wall or screen. It wasn't that effective as you'll see from the pictures below.
This is the projector which powers the whole game. The mirror and lens swivel around projecting the images of the ducks from the lights below. The small black square (circled in red above) is a light sensor. When the gun is fired, it produces a small burst of light. The light sensor can very cleverly sense when a shot of light bounces off the wall and travels back along the same path back into the projector.
The blog beforemario has a fantastic post detailing exactly how this subtly complex system works, complete with more schematics and diagrams that also explain how the animations are produced and registered.
It's difficult to get a good picture of the whole rig in action, but here's a short sequence of some ducks flying.
Nintendo CTG-BK6 (1979)
The CTG-BK6 is one of Nintendo's earliest consoles that were built to be played on color TVs (CTG= Color TV Game). There were a few different models produced, each with their own unique games. The unit here played a game similar to the popular "Breakout" series. Others included games like "Pong," "Othello" or racing games.
A description of the buttons from ZadocPaet:
"From left to right. The first thing is a "serve" button. This serves the ball to get the game going or to bring it back into play if you miss it. Then there's the power switch. The red button is the reset button. The first switch selects the games. You can see a chart below of the brick configuration of each game. Next is a switch that selects the number of ball per round. Finally, there's the knob that is used to control the paddle on screen."
Here it is in action:
ZadocPaet also picked up an old school Game and Watch and a Nintendo Roulette set, which you can check out here.
A little more research reveals the diverse wealth of games and toys Nintendo produced between 1965 and 1983. As Nintendo moved away from simply making playing cards, they expanded more and more into board games and early electronic games which ranged from curious to downright strange. We've chosen a few more of our favorites below. Many thanks to beforemario.com for its extensive catalog and research.
The Nintendo Love Tester (1969)
Aptly released in the year known for its "Summer of Love" this "mature" Nintendo toy used simple circuitry to measure the conductivity…er..we mean "love" between two people."
The Love Tester was one of the first Nintendo products to be sold internationally, and in fact was the first Nintendo item to make use of electronics.
Nintendo Ultra Hand (1966)
Nintendo continued to grow outside of the traditional playing card and board games areas with this toy.
The toy came with stands and balls that could be used for practice, and continued to grow in popularity until 1970, going through multiple releases, and was the first Nintendo item to sell 1 million units.
Nintendo's Baseball Board (1965)
This more traditional board game (which you can still find versions of in some arcades today) had a player pitching a ball and slugging for the fences with some simple mechanical engineering.
Pressing the blue button pitches the ball, while the white turns the batter to swing. Players can keep of hits, runs, balls, strikes, and outs using the dials seen below.
Nintendo Light Telephone (1971)
Okay so this is pretty interesting. Using solar power (yes really) this weird gadget was able to transport sound. And while Nintendo didn't invent this technology, it's application to these weird light-walkie-talkies is pretty amazing.
The sound picked up by the microphone of the Light Telephone is coded into the transmitted light, decoded again by the receiving party's Light Telephone using a solar cell, and played over the headphone. This creates, in effect, a two-way walkie talkie without the use of radio waves.
Nintendo Chiritori (1979)
Our final pick here is what amounts to a remote controlled vacuum. The Chiritori is like the Roomba's great grandfather who is really cute and fun, but really can't do that much anymore because he's kinda small and gets tired quickly.
The Chiritori spins clockwise when turned on, and will stop spinning and move straight in the direction it's facing when the button the remote is pushed. In this way, you can clean up very small messes, inefficiently. But it is cute!! It even came with stickers to create a face on the little guy. Watch this guy in action to see how it works.
Nintendo released plenty more traditional board games and wacky gadgets. To learn more, we can't recommend beforemario.com enough. It's a resource wholly dedicated to the topic and has more information than you can shake a One-Up Mushroom at.