“Playing card” company is a bit of an understatement. Nintendo was a grey market entertainment company - playing cards were banned in Japan, and a workaround was designing the cards with those beautiful drawings instead of suits. This is also why card companies were deeply associated with the Yakuza.
Nintendo also operated casinos and love hotels, with prostitutes. In fact, they did a lot of weird maneuvering during the launch of the Famicom to tip off the Yakuza, who wanted to keep their strong ties and get early access to the hardware.
There’s a whole book about how Nintendo and Sega had some crazy connections with the Yakuza and those shaped several projects in these companies.
I really feel this lately. The news is shit. My anxiety has been high so I go straight to the NYT games app instead of scrolling through the front page.
Also as someone subscribed to both, the games are way cheaper. So it makes sense that more people can afford a continuous gaming subscription through them.
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