Yamauchi cut out all extraneous devices to save money, but he told the engineers to include, for a trivial added cost, circuitry and a connector that could send or receive an unmodified signal to the central processor. The connector could pave the way for expansion—the addition of anything from a modem to a keyboard. It was why the machine would later be called Yamauchi’s Trojan Horse: It slipped into living rooms with nothing but a pair of controllers, innocently toylike, yet it included the capability to do far more than play games.

in 1907, when Nintendo became the first Japanese company to manufacture Western-style playing cards,

Yamauchi founded Nintendo Koppai in Meiji 22 (1889), to produce and sell the handmade cards. The kanji characters he chose to make up the name of his new company—nin-ten-do—could be understood as “Leave luck to heaven,” or “Deep in the mind we have to do whatever we have to do.” The most common reading of it was “Work hard, but in the end it is in heaven’s hands.

The Nintendo way of adapting technology is not to look for the state of the art but to utilize mature technology that can be mass-produced cheaply,” says Gunpei Yokoi.