Nintendo

The Origin of Nintendo Nintendo got their start making gambling cards fashioned after 15th century European gambling cards. These cards can be traced back to Portugal, the native home of a popular style of playing cards called Dragon cards.

Sir Francis Xavier, a Portuguese priest for the Catholic Church, inadvertently is responsible for bringing gambling to Japan. In August of 1549, Sir Francis Xavier came as a missionary to Kagoshima, Japan, in the name of a group for which he was a co-founder the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits. The men on this ship brought their Portuguese Dragon cards along with them on the voyage and were all too eager to teach the native Japanese not only how to play, but how to gamble as well. As gambling spread, the Japanese government outlawed the act of private gambling. Thus the people had to change their cards if they were going to keep them. And so they came up with the whimsical and colorful flower designs of the Hanafuda cards. Three hundred and forty years later, Nintendo began to mass produce these same cards. And these became Nintendo's main source of income for almost a hundred years. Nintendo literally owes their business to none other than Sir Francis Xavier. The same man that suggested there should be an inquisition. If this Jesuit Priest had not "accidentally" brought gambling to Japan, Nintendo could never have existed.

Brief Nintendo History

On September 23, 1889, Fusajiro Yamauchi founded a small company called Nintendo Koppai or The Nintendo Playing Card Company. Nintendo is a Japanese word which can be roughly translated, "It comes from heaven." Nintendo's first venture was making handmade Hanafuda cards, but over time this expanded into a line of vacuum cleaners. a taxi cab service, a love hotel chain and toys similar to the "Love Tester" in 1978. However, their success didn't begin until Shigeru Miyamoto, an engineer by trade, made his first game for Nintendo in the 1970s: Donkey Kong.

Origin of Hanafuda Cards and Modern Playing Cards

The handmade Hanafuda cards made by Nintendo can be traced back to the Dragon cards from Portugal, which can in turn be traced back to a very early form of the Tarot Card Deck called by names like "The Devil's Bible" and "The Devil's Picture Book." Tarot cards are common among occultists and spiritualists. Tarot Cards are most famous for fortune-telling and what we currently call the modern playing deck of cards actually is derived from these cards. Common playing cards have four suits: Spades, Hearts, Clubs and Diamonds. All of these suits can be found in an earlier form in the Tarot Card Deck (Cups, Wands, Pentacles and Swords), which are also a modified form of the suits found in the Dragon Cards Deck.

Although our modern cards have gained wide acceptance as merely "Playing Cards", they can still be used as tools of divination, as seen in this Michael Vrubel painting, The Fortune Teller. Not only are modern playing cards useable for divination, even the cards Nintendo makes, the Hanafuda cards, can be used for divination as well. You see, it's quite easy to take something occult like the Tarot Cards and over time modify them until they gain acceptance. Is it possible that modern games could have links to the occult as well? Perhaps just like the Tarot cards, something occult is slipping into our homes completely unnoticed. It was so easy for the Tarot cards to find entrance into our homes, from an occult deck of cards to the modern day playing deck cards. Would you really be surprised if the same thing didn't happen with the digital games of our time? History repeats itself, we should not be surprised to find that the exact same thing that happened in the past will happen again in the future.

Nintendo Censorship

In the '90s, Nintendo censored games based on this list of ten rules. It's the closest thing that could be found to a policy on religion. Rule number 7 is very clear about what Nintendo games could portray. It says, "Must not reflect ethnic, religious, nationalistic, or sexual stereotypes of language; this includes symbols that are related to any type of racial, religious, nationalistic, or ethnic group, such as crosses, pentagrams, God, Gods, Satan, hell, Buddha." Nintendo was very clear that they did not want to insult any religious group and they were very careful about what they would allow into any Nintendo games.

However, Nintendo hasn't always followed by their own rules. You'd think from this that Nintendo had no intention of including religion in their games at all. Then one day that changed forever. In 1986, Nintendo unveiled The Legend of Zelda, which took these same rules and threw them out the window. The main character had a cross on his shield similar to a medieval crusader. Perhaps Nintendo was not afraid of religious content after all. In fact, the religious content of this game doesn't end there. Among the hero's loot, there is a yellow book called "The Magic Book", but the original Japanese title was "the Bible".



The official Nintendo statement is that The Legend of Zelda is based on fantasy and that all of the religious content on the game has no bases in reality. However, if that's true, why does Official Nintendo Artwork depict the main character praying before Jesus Christ on a crucifix? Perhaps there is more beneath the surface in Nintendo's games then they led on. Nintendo is in a large regard one of the most influential game companies in the world. While there are other companies like Sony and Microsoft, even these companies got their start by copying the successes of Nintendo. In the investigation of the influences these games have on the person playing them, it's very valuable to have insider information on the inspiration behind the games.

Inspiration for Nintendo Games

Very rarely will Nintendo ever discuss direct inspiration for their games, but in one instance, in an interview at wii.com Shigeru Miyamoto decided to explain the genesis of the Super Mario brothers franchise:

''"Having rigorously analyzed what exactly made people want to play one more time, I sketched out ideas for five games. At this point, Nintendo was the licensee for Popeye.... The basic concept of Popeye is that there is the hero and his rival who he manages to turn the tables on with the aid of spinach. It's identical to Pac-Man!" ''

This basically boils down to Mario being a replacement for Popeye.

Mario was intended to be Popeye at one point, but it just didn't work out for whatever reason. Mario is Popeye and Pac-Man, but repackaged. This chart should illustrate this clearly. In each of these three stories, there was a hero, a female lead character and an item that the hero eats to defeat the enemy. Popeye saves Olive Oyl with spinach from Bluto. This spinach gives Popeye superhuman or almost God-like strength. Pac-Man also follows the same pattern, eating power pellets, he is given almost superhuman or God-like strength to defeat ghosts. Once again, a God-like power. Mario saves the princess with a mushroom from a dragon.

Now notice, all of hero characters eat an item that gives superhuman or God-like. Now think about it, wasn't there a place in the Bible where a serpent said, that if someone ate a piece of fruit they would be like God? However these game stories suggest that eating food to gain god-like powers is a good thing. It's like Gnosticism which teaches that the serpent saved us from God with a fruit.

Nintendo's Christ-figures

In Super Paper Mario, it is revealed hat in the Mario game world there is a book of prophecy called the Light Prognosticus which predicts that one day a hero would come nd save the world. That hero just happens to be Mario. So, Mario was more than just a former carpenter turned plumber, who saves a princess and fights a dragon. He is also prophesied as the coming one to save the world.

In The Legend of Zelda, it is revealed that Zelda is a prophet. to whom it is revealed in vision that a boy from the forest, in green, would also appear to save the world. This boy also saves the princess from a king of demons. But he also happens to be the prophesied coming one who will save the world.

Metroid is the same. In a game called Metroid Prime, the game script contained the following text.

''"The prophecies tell of the coming of the worm. The prophecies also speak of the great defender, "the one who will deliver the world from evil. She comes dressed for war and her wrath is terrible. Do our eyes look forward seeing the hatchling as she once was. Or does she approach even now, arriving in our race's last hour. A Savior, clothed in machines crafted long ago."''

This woman is not just a mother-like figure attacked by a dragon in outer space. She is a prophesied Savior, predicted as a hero to save the world fallen into darkness.

Nintendo's three biggest stories have three prophesied heroes who fight either a dragon or a king of demons.These game idols that take people's time, money, and energy are Pseudo-Christ figures..

Learn about Metroid and also Fox McCloud