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Over the past few weeks, in between obsessing over whether to go with grey or neon Joy-Cons alongside my Switch pre-order, I've been idly leafing through Nintendo's pre-video game history. Thanks to the incredible efforts of collector Erik Voskuil and his blog Before Mario, it's been a delight looking back at the various offbeat creations as Nintendo moved from the playing card business that had kept it buoyant for the first 75 years of its life into the toy industry. It can be pretty informative, too. Did you know that Nintendo produced its own storage units for a short time in the early 70s, for example, a kind of precursor to the all-conquering Ikea Kallax unit that you'll spot in the background of every Eurogamer video. What's remarkable about the Unirack is how Nintendo it is, a colourful, playful unit that can be combined with other units for multiple configurations. Oh, and it comes with five multicoloured handkerchiefs that form part of its own in-built magic trick. I don't see Ikea doing that.
You see the same spirit that's stayed with Nintendo ever since in so much of its output of the time. A lot of that can be put down to Gunpei Yokoi, the engineer who joined Nintendo in 1965 and served as a catalyst for the company's new direction. You'll know the Ultra Hand, of course, the extending arm toy that started it all, but were you aware of the Light Telephone, Yokoi's bizarre take on the walkie-talkie that converted sound into light and back again. It's a device as pointless as it is ingenious, the kind of throwaway invention that just seemed to pour out of Nintendo at the time.
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