---
title: "Which came first, Nintendo or pizza?"
description: "Nintendo vs pizza: pizza came first, by 109 years — 1780 against 1889. What happened in each case, and why the dates are often given differently."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/nintendo-vs-pizza/
site: "At One Place"
---

# Which came first, Nintendo or pizza?

**Which came first, Nintendo or pizza?: pizza**

1780 — 109 years before Nintendo

pizza came first, by 109 years. Tomato-topped flatbread was being sold in Naples.

## Side by side

|  | Nintendo | pizza |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 1889 | 1780 |
| Date | 1889-09-23 | — |
| Category | company | food |
| What happened | Fusajiro Yamauchi began making hanafuda playing cards in Kyoto. | Tomato-topped flatbread was being sold in Naples. |

## Nintendo

Nintendo was founded in 1889 to make handmade hanafuda cards, and it was a playing-card company for about eighty years. It is older than the Ford Motor Company (1903), older than the aeroplane, older than the Eiffel Tower by five months, and older than the modern Olympic Games. Before settling on video games in the 1970s it tried taxis, instant rice and a chain of love hotels.

## pizza

Flatbreads with toppings are ancient, but pizza in the sense people mean — wheat base, tomato, baked in a wood oven — dates from Naples in the late 1700s, and could not have existed earlier because tomatoes only reached Europe from the Americas in the 16th century and were widely thought poisonous for two hundred years. The Margherita story, in which a Naples pizzaiolo created a red, white and green pizza for Queen Margherita in 1889, rests on a single document now widely believed to be a forgery. The first American pizzeria, Lombardi's in New York, was licensed in 1905.

## Common questions

### Which came first, Nintendo or pizza?

pizza, by 109 years — 1780 against 1889.

### When did Nintendo start?

1889. Fusajiro Yamauchi began making hanafuda playing cards in Kyoto.

### When did pizza start?

1780. Tomato-topped flatbread was being sold in Naples.

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## Sources

- Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (https://www.wikidata.org/) [CC0 1.0]
- Typical range compiled from manufacturer specifications — At One Place (/about/)