In 1889, Nintendo was established by Fusajiro Yamauchi to produce hanafuda: Japanese playing cards, which often feature elegant designs of flowers and foliage. The company became the biggest hanafuda manufacturer in Kyoto, notably selling many decks to the yakuza. In subsequent decades, Nintendo branched into taxi services, ramen noodles and toys before finally arriving at video games in the 1970s. It still makes hanafuda cards today, now bearing the likenesses of Mario and Pokémon, beloved stars from its gaming empire.
Playing cards are a social technology that has long offered an excuse to get a group of people around a table to join in some light-hearted entertainment and let their defences down. While today this role is often fulfilled by video games — groups of young men often best express their feelings over a game of FIFA — playing cards have not disappeared, and continue to find their way into all manner of video game genres.
In Card Shark, one of this year’s best indie titles for the Nintendo Switch, you join a con artist and must cheat your way to the top of 18th-century French society through the medium of card tricks. Meanwhile, Inscryption, winner of several major awards when it was released last year, subverts a simple card game into something new by lurching nightmarishly into a postmodern horror story. More than a millennium after they were first used, playing cards can still surprise and delight us. What gives them this endurance, when all around them the 21st century offers forms of entertainment infinitely more visceral and spectacular?