A Nintendo product museum has just opened in a Japanese department store, showing off the products the company has produced over the years. Nintendo started as a playing card manufacturing company back in 1889, and since then has had a finger in a number of business-pies, including:

• A taxi service
• A "love hotel" chain
• TV network
• Food company
• A remote controlled vacuum cleaner (?!)

Finally, in 1975, Nintendo dove into the electronics world and started working with gaming hardware, a still-early technology at the time. Shigeru Miyamoto joined shortly thereafter, and Nintendo's fate was sealed.

Source: Joystiq