Few companies illustrate the value of reinvention as dramatically as Nintendo, a name now inseparable from video games — but one that spent the better part of a century in an entirely different business first.

Founded in 1889 in Kyoto, Japan, Nintendo’s original product was hanafuda, a style of Japanese playing cards, handmade and sold for use in traditional card games. For decades, that was the entire business. The company tried, with mixed results, to expand into other ventures over the following decades — a taxi company, a love hotel chain, instant rice, even a television network at various points — none of which meaningfully stuck.

It wasn’t until the 1970s, nearly 90 years after its founding, that Nintendo began experimenting seriously with electronic toys and arcade games, eventually finding real traction with Donkey Kong in 1981 and, a few years later, the Nintendo Entertainment System — the product line that would come to define the company for the rest of its history.

What makes this pivot notable isn’t just its scale — a card company becoming one of the most recognizable entertainment brands in the world — but how long the company was willing to experiment across unrelated industries before finding the one that worked. Nintendo’s turnaround wasn’t a single decisive bet. It was decades of trying things that didn’t work, staying financially intact enough to keep trying, until something did.

There’s a useful reminder in that timeline for any business treating a single failed pivot as proof the whole enterprise is doomed. Reinvention is rarely instant, and it’s rarely the first attempt that sticks. It’s usually the company that survives long enough to try the fifth or sixth idea that gets remembered for the one that worked.