It was Christmas day 1989 -- or maybe it was 1988 -- when a much younger version of me unwrapped his first Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) video game console.
I was over the Moon with this Christmas present. Prior to this moment, I had only played the NES with my best friend who lived across the street. Every day we'd spend hours playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game until his mom would finally have enough and send us outside.
My experience is likely similar to other kids from the 1980s. The NES home console from video game company Nintendo (NTDOY 2.25%) launched in the U.S. in 1985. And it was a runaway success story, propelling the company to the forefront of consumer awareness. It reportedly sold over 60 million NES consoles, which was an unprecedented number for a video game company at the time.
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Some might quibble with me regarding the timing of Nintendo's rise to fame. After all, the company released coin-operated arcade games in the 1970s. And its 1981 release of Donkey Kong quickly became one of the best-selling arcade cabinets of all time. So perhaps Nintendo was already a household name long before I opened my NES on that cheery Christmas morning.
But here's what we can't quibble over: Nintendo's first video game release didn't come until about 90 years after the company started -- and it speaks to an impressive degree of corporate endurance that should draw investors' attention today.
How Nintendo got its start
In 1889, Washington became a state, the Eiffel Tower was inaugurated, and Benjamin Harrison was sitting in the White House. That same year in Japan, Fusajiro Yamauchi opened a small shop called Nintendo Koppai in the city of Kyoto to sell playing cards. Yes, playing cards.
Back in 1889, Japan was banning most playing cards. But Nintendo's first cards were in the flower-themed Hanafuda style, which was allowed. Nintendo continues to generate revenue from playing cards to this very day. During its fiscal 2023 (which ended in March), the company had sales of 5.7 billion yen for playing cards, or around $40 million.
Nowadays, Nintendo sells all sorts of card games, including many that feature some of its most prominent video game characters such as Mario, Pikachu, and Zelda.
What it all means for investors
Nintendo has a market capitalization of over $60 billion today. But this company went public in Japan in 1962 at a much lower valuation and made a lot of investors very rich along the way. Can you imagine how wild it would have been in the 1960s to build an investment thesis around a playing-card company?
Even crazier, imagine having the confidence to invest in Nintendo in the early 1970s as the company started pursuing video games despite already having a 90-year operating history in something completely unrelated.
I believe there are multiple takeaways for investors. First, the future probably doesn't look anything like we think. Yamauchi himself couldn't have imagined what Nintendo has become. He died in 1940, which was 18 years before the first video game (Tennis for Two) was even invented.
Investing is all about the future. But the further out into the future we try to look, the blurrier the image becomes. New technologies and changing consumer trends will eventually shape a world that's hard for us to envision today. This is why it's important for long-term investors to look for businesses with optionality -- the ability to adapt and change. This is the second takeaway.
It's admittedly difficult to identify companies with optionality beforehand. But businesses with meager resources, deteriorating economics, and non-visionary leaders will likely have a harder time with optionality than others. Therefore, it may be easier to eliminate companies with low chances of adapting to an uncertain future.
In the case of Nintendo, investors should be encouraged for the future. Displaying Mario, Pikachu, Zelda, and more on playing cards demonstrates just how well-known and valuable its intellectual property (IP) for video games has become over the past 40 years. And this IP is a great reason to keep holding Nintendo stock for the long haul.
In 2023, Nintendo leveraged its IP to make a very successful Mario movie. And in the not-so-distant future, the company even plans to turn its Zelda IP into a live-action film.
Just as video games weren't on Yamauchi's mind in 1889, these full-length films probably weren't on developers' minds in the 1970s -- the future will probably look different than what we expect. It's why optionality is important. And Nintendo's optionality is why it's still a good stock to hold for the long term.
