---
title: "Which came first, Nintendo or Tyrannosaurus rex?"
description: "Nintendo vs Tyrannosaurus rex: Tyrannosaurus rex came first, by 68.002 million years — 68 million years ago against 1889. What happened in each case."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/nintendo-vs-t-rex/
site: "At One Place"
---

# Which came first, Nintendo or Tyrannosaurus rex?

**Which came first, Nintendo or Tyrannosaurus rex?: Tyrannosaurus rex**

68 million years ago — 68.002 million years before Nintendo

Tyrannosaurus rex came first, by 68.002 million years. T. rex lived in the last two million years of the age of dinosaurs.

## Side by side

|  | Nintendo | Tyrannosaurus rex |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 1889 | 68 million years ago |
| Date | 1889-09-23 | — |
| Category | company | nature |
| What happened | Fusajiro Yamauchi began making hanafuda playing cards in Kyoto. | T. rex lived in the last two million years of the age of dinosaurs. |

## 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.

## Tyrannosaurus rex

Tyrannosaurus rex lived from about 68 to 66 million years ago, right at the end of the Cretaceous. Stegosaurus died out around 150 million years ago. That means T. rex is closer in time to us — 66 million years — than it is to Stegosaurus, by more than 20 million years. The two are routinely drawn in the same picture and never met.

> Deep-time date, approximate to within a million years or so.

## Common questions

### Which came first, Nintendo or Tyrannosaurus rex?

Tyrannosaurus rex, by 68.002 million years — 68 million years ago against 1889.

### When did Nintendo start?

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

### When did Tyrannosaurus rex start?

68 million years ago. T. rex lived in the last two million years of the age of dinosaurs.

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## Sources

- Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (https://www.wikidata.org/) [CC0 1.0]
- Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History — Smithsonian Institution (https://naturalhistory.si.edu/)