Fifty year old Nintendo Playing Card sample book

In the 1960s, Nintendo produced and sold hundreds of different playing card designs. When pitching these to prospective wholesale buyers and toy shop owners, the Nintendo sales departement used sample books that showcased the range of cards available.

While in later years Nintendo used printed brochures and leaflets to advertise their cards product - like this one from 1983 - the sample books used in the 1960s were more like albums, containing actual cards.

Not only did these show the cards in exactly the color, size and shape as they would be delivered, but it also provided a flexible sales catalogue, that could easily be changed to stay up to date as the product range evolved. This was vital in these playing cards heydays, when new designs were constantly added.

For Nintendo collectors and playing card enthusiasts, finding such a sample book is much like a holy grail. Not many were made, let alone survive fifty years on. They were intended for internal use by Nintendo only, and they are as rare as hen's teeth.

Some time ago, I was lucky to acquire two copies, with different content. In this post we will take a look at one of the two, and in a future post I will cover the other one.

This sample book dates from a time when Nintendo was still branding itself as Nintendo Playing Card Co., Ltd. Although no exact date of origin is known for this item, based on the contents these copies must be from the late 1960s.

It is possible that this particular sample book design was introduced some years earlier, and used for multiple years, changing the content over time.

Nintendo playing card sample book - front cover

The book measures 34.8 by 23.6 centimetres. It contains eight thick pieces of paper that hold cards on both sides, making a total of 16 pages.

The book contains real specimens of playing cards, which are glued to the pages. Most of the pages include eight cards, while some contain between five and seven cards. The total number of cards included in this sample book is 121. All cards are different.

Added Nintendo mini game # 50 to my collection

This being the first post of 2020, let me start by wishing you the best for this year. Granted, a quarter of it is already over. And with the global virus pandemic in full effect, it probably will not go down as one of the best years ever. But still, I hope you can make the most of it.

The last months I have been able to add some missing items to my collection, and I plan to show these in a few blog posts over the coming weeks, and included some things I have not covered before as well.

Today we start with a game from Nintendo's Mini Game series. The game is called Picture Puzzle (ピクチュアパズル). Like all of theseMini Games, it dates from the first half of the 1970s.

As reported a few month ago, I was chasing the last one of the 50 known Mini Games that I needed to complete the collection of these fun little toys. To my surprise I discovered another one, that I was not yet aware of.

Mini Game Picture Puzzle, the 50th mini game in my collection

This particular Mini Game is very simliar in style to two other Mini Games already in my collection, shown here in the middle and right in the picture below.

These two other games, although appearing to be different, both contain an identical set of three cardboard puzzles. It is just a different one of the three that is shown on top in the blister pack.

Nintendo mini game found after 20-year search

They say patience is a virtue, and that's certainly true when trying to complete the Nintendo Mini Game Series (ミニゲームシリーズ) from the early 1970s. It is one of my favorite series from Nintendo's history. These are fun, colorful, simple games, with a lot of variety. I guess they also remind me of toys from my own childhood, so nostalgia probably plays a role in their desirability.

From a collecting point of view, there is a lot to collect; fifty games in total. [Update 2023: actually 52!] But not so many that completing a set feels unachievable. A nice goal.

I started collecting twenty years ago, and although they were released around thirty years earlier, within a few years I managed to find most. Many I picked up as so-called 'new old stock' in liquidation sales of old toy stores. In the years that followed, I filled in most of the few remaining holes in the collection. This was a period when vintage Nintendo toys from the 60s and 70s were a bit more easy to find than today, if you knew were to look. It also helped that interest in these was quite low at the time. Looking back, it turned out to be a good moment to start a collection.

After about ten years of searching, I had found 48 of the known games.

Since then I have been on the lookout constantly, but fruitlessly, for the remaining two games. Ten years of searching, without any result.

Nintendo Mini Games series (1971-1976)

No result, that is, until today!

Perseverance pays off, and twenty years after starting the quest to find all Nintendo Mini Games, I added one more to my collection: Diving Shot (ダイビングショット).

Nintendo Mini Game Diving Shot

This was the first time since I started collecting that I found this game for sale, in an online auction, and I managed to grab it. The cool 1970s art-style of the blister pack alone is enough to make me smile from ear to ear.

Nintendo cards catalogue from the mid 1930s

Some time ago, I posted about a Nintendo company report from 1970, which provided an interesting view inside the company at a time when they were expanding into an allround toy company and just starting out in the field of electronics.

Today we will travel even further back in time, to the mid 1930s, when Nintendo was still fully and solely focussed on their original product: playing cards. At the time Nintendo was the largest manufacturer of playing cards in Japan and under management of its second president Sekiryo Yamauchi, who in 1929 had succeeded his father in law, company founder Fusajiro Yamauchi.

Front (left) and back cover of the mid 1930s Nintendo catalogue

We take our trip through time using a recently surfaced Nintendo product catalogue that is more than eighty years old. The exact publishing date is not known, but based on the content, it is believed to be from between 1933 and 1937.

The catalogue measures 19.2 by 8.6 centimeters when closed. It contains 16 pages that fold out to double that width. It is printed double-sided in four colours: black, red, green and blue. Different to Western catalogues and modern day Japanese ones, the pages of the catalogue open on the left. The Japanese writing is top-to-bottom and right-to-left, as was also common at the time.

Although the catalogue contains some information in English, it is aimed at a Japanse speaking audience, with all sales information in Japanese only.

The catalogue contains four pages with information about the company, four pages with general marketing information about their playing cards, and eight pages with tables listing all products and their sales prices.