99. Some video game companies didn't start out that way. When the Japanese-American game company Nintendo was founded, what did it produce?
From Quiz Video Games History Grab-Bag
Answer:
Playing cards
Founded way back on 23 September 1889 in Kyoto, Japan, Nintendo was originally a manufacturer of playing cards. Then it expanded to other toys and games. In the 1960s, Nintendo diversified to owning hotels.
Beginning in the 1970s, Nintendo started making video games. In 1980, the company released a hand-held electronic gaming device called Game and Watch, produced until 1991. Simple games like Chef, whose object was keeping food in the air, could be played in this forerunner to the Game Boy.
In 1985, Nintendo produced its first home video game console to be attached to a television set: the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), or Famicom in Japan, which ran on an 8-bit CPU. So many popular and long-running games were created, developed, or adapted for the NES: "Super Mario Bros.", "The Legend of Zelda", "Donkey Kong", "Castlevania", and "Final Fantasy".
The handheld, green-screened Game Boy, invented by Gunpei Yokoi, appeared in 1989 and superseded the Game and Watch. It was the first portable console to use game cartridges. For the first time, then, players could interchange games and not be limited to what was "hard-wired" in the device -- quite an innovation.