Nintendo's Origins

You may think you know the Nintendo story: a plumber named Mario, a princess named Zelda… and didn’t they buy the Seattle Mariners at some point? We thought we knew it too. And then we started researching and were blown away. The lovable Disney-like Nintendo that we know today is a 130 year-old a playing card company (i.e. gambling), forged in the shadowy world of the Yakuza and shaped by a four-generation cycle of bitter family betrayal. And its unlikely transformation into a global multi-billion dollar media monopoly was led by an iron-fisted patriarch who — amazingly — never played a video game in his life! Get ready for one of our favorite stories Acquired has ever told — we couldn’t make this one up if we tried! Links: Our Atari episode with Nolan Bushnell https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/atari-with-nolan-bushnellVideo of id Software’s legendary PC “port” of Super Mario Brothers 3 https://vimeo.com/148909578Episode sources https://docs.google.com/document/d/11N6jjXkUpCoB2-8EQM3mYeJpr6X_A8NVgrlwYqX8ji0/edit Carve Outs: Everything Everywhere All At Once https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6710474/Michael Lewis on Tim Ferriss https://tim.blog/2020/05/01/michael-lewis/ and on CSPAN https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prW1KNJ8EtY Sponsors: Vanta: https://bit.ly/acquiredvantaServiceNow: https://bit.ly/acquiredservicenow26Legora: https://bit.ly/acquiredlegoraStatsig: https://bit.ly/acquiredstatsig26 More Acquired! Get email updates https://www.acquired.fm/email with hints on next episode and follow-ups from recent episodesJoin the Slack http://acquired.fm/slackSubscribe to ACQ2 https://pod.link/acquiredlpMerch Store https://www.acquired.fm/store! © Copyright 2015-2026 ACQ, LLC

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ben Gilbert?

  Oh, have I ever done my Mario impression for you?

• 0:04David Rosenthal?

  No, I would not expect you to have a Mario impression.

• 0:07Ben Gilbert?

  I don't know where this came from. Maybe all the Super Smash I was playing in college on N64, but here goes.

• 0:16David Rosenthal?

  That is amazing. Wow. I had no idea you had that in you. I'm very impressed.

• 0:25Ben Gilbert?

  See, I've been storing that up for this episode.

• 0:27David Rosenthal?

  Wow. When Charles Martin moves on from this mortal coil, I think Nintendo knows who the replacement is gonna be.

• 0:37Ben Gilbert?

  That is so good.

• 0:39David Rosenthal?

  I'm never gonna be able to look at you the same.

• 0:41Ben Gilbert?

  Good. That was the goal. All right, let's do it.

• 0:44David Rosenthal?

  Let's go.

• 1:02Ben Gilbert?

  Welcome to season 12, episode 3 of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert.

• 1:11David Rosenthal?

  I'm David Rosenthal.

• 1:12Ben Gilbert?

  And we are your hosts. Video games are an absolutely enormous industry with a market size of over $100 billion of consumer spend every year. That makes it bigger than Hollywood and the music industry combined today in 2023. And while we are all aware that games are a fixture of life today, from your kids playing Minecraft on an Xbox to you popping open Candy Crush on your phone for a flight, this phenomenon of humans spending all this time playing video games is actually pretty new. Once upon a time, video games were a tiny niche market aimed at just teenage boys as a subset of the toys category that had fits and starts.

• 1:54Ben Gilbert?

  It was not all up and to the right. And in the early 1980s, the video game industry in the US had some dire straits and nearly evaporated entirely until Nintendo made a huge bet and changed history forever.

• 2:09David Rosenthal?

  Oh, man. I've been a gamer all my life. I love video game history. I was so looking forward to doing this episode and covering Nintendo. And I had no idea what an incredible story it is of how Nintendo single-handedly resuscitated this industry and achieved 95% global market share and dominated this multi-billion dollar industry that was left for dead. That is the story we're going to tell today. Like, we're not going to get to the Switch. We're not going to get to the Wii. We're barely even going to get to the Super Nintendo.

• 2:43Ben Gilbert?

  Yes, on this episode, we'll be covering Nintendo's early years, or at least the first 100 years of the company, up until about 1990. And then I think we have a part two in the works because the story of Nintendo after 1990 is like a completely different company and a completely different set of analyses to do. So consider this a part one and truly a story all to its own. Well, listeners, we have a big announcement. We are renaming the LP show. The LP show has been public for the last year and has effectively served as Acquired's ESPN2 channel.

• 3:15David Rosenthal?

  The deuce.

• 3:16Ben Gilbert?

  Yes. So we're going to make it official. The LP show is now known as ACQ2. It still has the same great expert interviews with founders and investors like Vijay Raji, the former Facebook exec who founded Statsig, and Megan Reynolds, the head of Capital Formation at Altimeter. You can still find it in every single podcast player, whether you are an LP or not. So if you've never given it a shot, there is no better time. Just search ACQ2 in any podcast player and we have some banger episodes coming up in the next couple of months on the calendar. For our LPs, just so you're not confused, we will keep updating your old feed with all these new episodes, just so you don't miss them. And speaking of the LP program, we are revamping it. It is not going away.

• 3:59Ben Gilbert?

  We want to basically shift away from it being about these episodes and make it more about bringing you closer into the acquired kitchen. So for our limited partners, we're bringing back private Zoom calls that we'll email you about the next one soon. And we'll be adding a new feature. You can help us pick future episodes. So LPs, look out for an email on that and more stuff to come. You can join at acquired.fm/lp.

• 4:26Ben Gilbert?

  All right, listeners. Now is a great time to tell you about a longtime friend of the show, Vanta. AI has scrambled the whole security picture. It used to be that you proved that you were secure once a year on audit or a static PDF, then everyone would nod and you're done. But in an AI-first world, that doesn't hold up anymore.

• 4:45David Rosenthal?

  Yep. Your risk surface changes every week now. A vendor turns on an AI feature, or someone writes in a new model without telling IT, and your posture is different than it was last week, let alone at your last audit. Vanta's own research found that around 70% of companies have this quote-unquote "shadow AI" running with no security review at all.

• 5:06Ben Gilbert?

  Right. And that's where Vanta comes in. They're the leading agentic trust platform, meaning they've built the thing that closes the gap. And the way that they close that gap is Vanta Agent. Think of it as a GRC engineer, that's Governance, Risk and Compliance, except that it's software and it doesn't sleep. It finds the issues, drafts the fixes, and cuts the time that you'd spend on vendor assessments in half.

• 5:27David Rosenthal?

  In half! Which is exactly why more than 16,000 companies today run on Vanta. Companies like Ramp, Cursor, and Snowflake all stay audit-ready and catch the risks that crop up between audits across every vendor, every AI tool, the whole environment.

• 5:46Ben Gilbert?

  And that's the real value. Trust has to be continuous now, which is why Vanta automates your security, your compliance, and the work to earn and prove trust. We're huge fans of Vanta over here, and literally hundreds of Acquired listeners have become Vanta customers at their companies over the years. So you can get $1,000 off Vanta at vanta.com/acquired. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash acquired for $1,000 off, and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. After you finish this episode, come discuss it with the other 14,000 smart, thoughtful, kind, curious members of the Acquired community at acquired.fm/slash/Slack. And without further ado, David, take us in. And listeners, this is not investment advice. David and I may

• 6:28Ben Gilbert?

  have investments or make investments soon in the companies that we discuss, and this show is for informational and entertainment purposes only.

• 6:37David Rosenthal?

  So there are quite a lot of books written about the history of Nintendo, some of which are very good, and we've read basically all of them at this point. In particular, I would highly recommend Game Over and Power Up.

• 6:51Ben Gilbert?

  Yep, and I read Super Mario, also great.

• 6:54David Rosenthal?

  But the thing that we realized, and Ben and I were texting about this as we were doing the research, all these books either focus on the Nintendo Japan story, or the Nintendo America story, or the video games in America story, or the video games in Japan story, and they keep them separate. And it's super weird to us. I think that kind of misses the point of the story here, which is that the rise of video games and the rise of Nintendo is this incredible, interwoven, global tale. Nintendo of America wouldn't have happened without Nintendo of Japan, and Nintendo of Japan would not at all be what it is without Nintendo of America. So what we're going to try to do here is unite these stories and

• 7:35David Rosenthal?

  tell them together as one canonical Nintendo story. I think maybe for the first time, I don't know, at least that we've found, so this is going to be fun. So, speaking of this, we start our story appropriately enough, not in Japan in the late 1800s, when Nintendo was founded, but in California in the 1970s, with friend of the show, and one of, if not maybe the original father of Silicon Valley, Nolan Bushnell of Atari.

• 8:09Ben Gilbert?

  And certainly the father of the video games industry.

• 8:11David Rosenthal?

  We had a chance to interview Nolan back in 2019 on the show. You can find that episode in our back catalog. He is such a character. You can't understand him without listening to him, and he is one of a kind. So Nolan grows up in Utah, of all places, in the 1950s, and he's just from birth this incredible hustler and entrepreneur. And one of the jobs that he gets growing up is working at carnivals. He's literally a carny, and he keeps referring to himself as a carny in our interview with him, which is fun. Arcade games back then, in the 50s and 60s, were not what we think of arcade games today. They were what's called electromechanical games.

• 8:55David Rosenthal?

  So these are things like everything from you shoot the water gun to like make the balloons pop to little lights and stuff going on. You swing the hammer to hit the bell. They were games and they might've involved some circuitry components, lights and sounds, but they were not video games. And lots of bars had games like this. They were something to do at bars. In fact, one of the leading companies that made these electromechanical games back in the day was a little company called Sega, which will come up later. So Nolan, in addition to having this incredible entrepreneurial streak and background in arcades, he does something pretty unique.

• 9:35David Rosenthal?

  He goes to college at the University of Utah and majors in electrical engineering. And this was a pretty special place and department to be in at that time. Other folks who came out of the University of Utah Engineering School around this time, Alan Kay, Jim Clark of Silicon Graphics and Netscape, Ed Catmull of Pixar.

• 9:59Ben Gilbert?

  All of which have been protagonists of acquired episodes.

• 10:01David Rosenthal?

  I know, I know. It's just incredible Silicon Valley DNA that comes out of that time and specifically focused on graphics and innovating there, which of course Nolan becomes part of this tradition. So while he's there, he programs on a DEC PDP1. This is one of the original old school computers from the 50s and 60s. They, MIT and several others, had one of these devices and folks at MIT had, in their spare time, created a game for it. The very first video game played on a programmable computer, which was called Spacewar. And it was a very, very early rudimentary, you know, kind of like Asteroids, not quite

• 10:46David Rosenthal?

  Space Invaders.

• 10:47Ben Gilbert?

  Or Galaga.

• 10:48David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 10:49Ben Gilbert?

  It's funny how many early video games were space games because of Spacewar. They were inspired by and derivatives of Spacewar.

• 10:57David Rosenthal?

  And of course, what's like really easy graphical game that you could put on a black screen, that you had green little lines that you can manipulate on? Well, space, there's a lot of black in space.

• 11:06Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 11:06David Rosenthal?

  So when Nolan sees this, he's like, whoa, holy crap. You know, and nobody else who is playing Spacewar in the entire world or using a PDP1 has also worked at carnival arcades. And Nolan's like, man. This would kill it if I could bring it back to the arcades. But of course, at the time, I think a deck PDP one cost over $100,000, which is over a million dollars today. So like, the idea that you could domesticate this animal, not even bring it into homes, but get the price point down to a point where bars or arcades or carnivals could afford to buy these things. Like, no way.

• 11:42Ben Gilbert?

  Totally. I mean, it just literally never pays back when you're thinking about, I don't know if it was nickels or quarters, but whatever you're putting in the arcade machines, it's just never gonna pencil.

• 11:52David Rosenthal?

  So when Nolan graduates, he comes out to Proto Silicon Valley, and he gets a job as an engineer at one of the leading companies there. At the time, a company called Ampex. Their main market was making tape recorders that were used for movies, television, music, recording industries. But all the time that Nolan's working there, he can't really get both his entrepreneurial and carnival master DNA and this idea out of his heads of like, if you could domesticate video games and bring them to the consumer market, they would do really well. So finally, after a couple of years, by 1969, he thinks, you know, thanks to Fairchild and National Semiconductor, and now Intel at this point,

• 12:34David Rosenthal?

  silicon has gotten cheap enough that maybe you could do this and basically take Spacewar and build a machine cheap enough that you could sell it into arcades and carnivals.

• 12:45Ben Gilbert?

  It's total Moore's Law story. It's like exactly the way that we opened our Nvidia episode with, maybe not yet, but I can see it in the next year that it'll get cheap enough to make this new business viable.

• 12:54David Rosenthal?

  Yep. So he packs up and leaves Ampex, goes to start a company with fellow Ampex employee Ted Dabney. And their business plan is they're gonna do exactly this. They initially called the company Scissor G, but it turns out that name is already taken by a candle maker in Mendocino, I think Nolan told us.

• 13:13Ben Gilbert?

  I was gonna say, the problem with that name is that it's terrible, not that someone else also decided it was a good name.

• 13:18David Rosenthal?

  Thank God it was terrible. So Nolan racks his brain and comes up with an alternative idea. He's become a big Go player and he takes the term Atari from the game of Go, which Atari basically means check, the equivalent of check in chess in Go. They build a game called Computer Space that's based on Space War. This is the first commercialized programmed video arcade game in history. They put it together. They contract with a arcade distribution firm called Nutting Associates to distribute it. And it's okay. It's not really a profitable

• 13:59David Rosenthal?

  enterprise yet. One, because the amount of silicon required to run the game, remember this is coming from cutting edge scientific military use computers, is still enough that it costs too much to make these machines. It's not really economically viable yet. It has another more important problem, though, which is that consumers in America aren't really ready for space games. They haven't yet made the leap to we're going to live in fantasy worlds and we could pretend we're piloting a spaceship out in space and blasting enemies. That doesn't compete yet with audiences.

• 14:33Ben Gilbert?

  Right. It's escapism at its finest. And now we take it for granted that whenever you play a video game, you're entering some escapist fantasy. But that was a brand new novel idea.

• 14:43David Rosenthal?

  So they get this feedback, Nolan and Ted, and they think, all right, well, one, we need to make this technology simpler so that it's more affordable and cost effective. So they hire one of their coworkers from Ampex, a guy named Al Alcorn, who's an amazing engineer. One of the themes that's going to come up a bunch in this episode is the mythical 10x, 100x engineer or game designer, somebody who can do things that other people can't. And specifically, what was really valued in Silicon Valley and technology engineering at this time was the ability to design systems with the highest amount of functionality with the fewest number of chips, because every chip that you put in there added a whole lot of cost to the bill of materials.

• 15:26Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. And not just on the raw costs, but on the assembly time. Soldering takes time. And at this point, there's very little software involved in these games. You're mostly hard coding the functionality onto the motherboard itself, depending on what chips you put in.

• 15:45David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. To put a finer point on that, I don't think there's any software involved. Like, I think everything is hardcoded in these chips at this point in time.

• 15:52Ben Gilbert?

  Right. This is managing to create games using just electrical engineering.

• 15:56David Rosenthal?

  Right. And something I hadn't even thought about till now, all of the applications of silicon, to this point in time, they were mostly for military use cases, somewhat for industrial and commercial use cases. But the end products, like the physical devices that were being produced by all these companies, were not meant to be distributed in large numbers to consumers. If you're making systems for the government, you're not making a high number of machines.

• 16:26Ben Gilbert?

  Right. We were in the like hundreds, maybe low thousands of devices when you're considering military communications equipment. Now with arcades, you're into the thousands and potentially tens of thousands, which is a huge leap.

• 16:38David Rosenthal?

  So all this kind of value engineering, you can see why it's super, super important. So huge win. They bring Al Alcorn over. He is the engineer that can make this happen. And to get him started, Nolan decides that he's gonna give Al, because Al's never made a game before, he's gonna give him like a training project to get started. And he's thinking about what sort of like small toy game could I give out? And it just so happens that Nolan had recently been to a demonstration by the consumer electronics company Magnavox. And Magnavox, which at this point in time, they were one of the companies riding the

• 17:19David Rosenthal?

  wave of televisions across America, as we talked about in the NFL and plenty of other episodes. They were looking for ways to market their televisions as superior to other manufacturers out there like RCA or what have you. And they had come up with this little device that plugged into their televisions called the Odyssey. And they called this thing a closed-circuit electronic playground.

• 17:46David Rosenthal?

  What it actually was, was the very first home video game console. They just didn't think about it that way.

• 17:52Ben Gilbert?

  This just goes to show too, a lot of the times before a category is created, you don't know how to describe the job to be done of the very first product in the category. And so you come up with some really esoteric name like that. And it's only when five other competitors come in after you, does the category sort of get a name? Like video game consoles or home video games. And I think this came up way back when we interviewed Vlad from Webflow on one of the earliest acquired LP, now ACQ2, episodes. He brought up the fact that he's like, oh, people started calling us no-code. And he was like, we've been going for five years. We had no idea we were a no-code company, but now apparently that's a thing. And that's exactly what happened with the Magnavox Odyssey.

• 18:35David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, it's even more extreme than that. Not only did they not know what to call it, they had no idea what this market was. They thought this thing was a gee whiz device that they could have their sales reps in their stores around the country demonstrate to consumers to help them sell TVs. That's all that they thought about. They didn't think that this would be a market or a product line in and of its own. But they had created this machine in partnership with a guy named Ralph Baer, who really created it. They licensed it from him and he's known as the father of home video games. So they had game cards that you would plug into the Odyssey. And depending on which game cards you had plugged in, you could play different games. We'll see as we go along here, but it wouldn't be for several more years

• 19:20David Rosenthal?

  until that idea would come back and people would realize, oh, hey, there's actually value to selling not dedicated hardware into the home of like this console only plays this game, but you want interchangeable software here. So this Odyssey, like we said, Magnavox has no idea what they're doing with it here. And you can't blame them, there's no roadmap for this. But in what should have been assigned to them and certainly was assigned to Nolan.

• 19:47David Rosenthal?

  Even though they were not marketing this as a standalone device or anything like that, it becomes a pretty big success anyway, despite Magnavox. They end up selling a couple hundred thousand units of this thing.

• 19:58Ben Gilbert?

  The Magnavox Odyssey was invented to solve a problem that Magnavox had. And what they sort of failed to realize is that it had a tremendous job to be done for consumers, where they sort of accidentally fell backwards into a gold mine, but did not feel around enough to sort of grab the gold.

• 20:14David Rosenthal?

  Yes. Nolan, though, when he sees a demonstration of this, probably the most compelling game on the Odyssey was called table tennis. And it was like a very, very rudimentary approximation of either tennis or ping pong, you know, table tennis, that you could play with the Odyssey on your computer. So he brings this back to Atari and to Al and says, "Make something like this as your test project here." Al, of course, does, does it brilliantly. And they start playing around with it at the office and they're like, dang, this thing's kind of fun.

• 20:48Ben Gilbert?

  And wasn't it like a proof of concept game? It was basically a demo to show off the potential of what they could do as Atari. And they didn't realize in creating Pong, right there on the spot, they invented a mega hit as the proof of concept.

• 21:04David Rosenthal?

  Yes, that was the thing. So famously, they take the first cabinet to Andy Cap's Tavern in Sunnyvale, California, and they convince the owner there to set up this Pong machine, as they start calling it, at Andy Cap's. And it just becomes like a quarter vacuum, like a magnet. Literally, all of the pieces of coin in customers' pockets just get sucked right into Pong. It's incredibly compelling. And the thing that makes it so accessible to just average people who are going to the bar is it's relatable. You don't have to make the leap that you're a pilot of a spaceship out in space. Everybody knows what table

• 21:49David Rosenthal?

  tennis is. You know how to play this game. You know what you're doing. And that gets you in to try it. And once you start playing this thing and you get engrossed in it, and Pong at this point in time is only two-player. There's no AI here. You have to play against somebody else. You get the competitive factor going, especially in a bar. And they're like, oh, we got something good here.

• 22:08Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 22:09David Rosenthal?

  So they start producing these cabinets, selling them to bars and arcades around the country. It's going really well, so well that a certain newly minted venture capitalist comes and seeks out Nolan and Atari, the legendary Don Valentine.

• 22:30Ben Gilbert?

  When you say newly minted, you know, it's funny in today's terms, he'd be like an emerging manager. I think he had raised, what, $5 million fund? And this is effectively like Sequoia Fund One, looking to make its first investment.

• 22:42David Rosenthal?

  Yes, and Atari becomes Sequoia Capital's very first investment. And it goes even deeper than that. With the money, Nolan and the team at Atari start bringing on additional folks to build and engineer games that they can sell. You know, this Pong thing worked out pretty well. They hire a young kid named Steve Jobs.

• 23:04Ben Gilbert?

  Amazing.

• 23:05David Rosenthal?

  To come in and design a one-player, a solo version of Pong that you can play, which ends up being called Breakout, that he does with his buddy Steve Wozniak.

• 23:14Ben Gilbert?

  This is like my favorite hidden Atari story is that freaking Steve Jobs was the designer and the creator with Steve Wozniak of Breakout.

• 23:23David Rosenthal?

  So just like that, not one, not two, but three industries are born. You've got the home video game console business with Magnavox and The Odyssey that Atari copied with Pong. You've got the arcade video game business that Atari is really entering here and starts to take off faster than anything. And then you've got the personal home computer business that Steve and Woz start with Apple. And it all comes out of this one moment, which is incredible. So unlike today with games or any type of software, there's no App Store out there. Turns out that distribution is a critical element to building a technology company.

• 24:06David Rosenthal?

  So the arcade business with Atari starts to really take off. Companies, both existing electromechanical games companies like Sega and others get into the video game business. Atari is out there, obviously the leader. By the mid to late 70s, the top arcade games out there were making billions of dollars in annual revenue. Like Space Invaders, which was launched by the Japanese company Taito in 1978. It does $2 billion in annual revenue in the US alone.

• 24:39Ben Gilbert?

  Whoa, what year is this?

• 24:40David Rosenthal?

  This is in 1978.

• 24:42Ben Gilbert?

  I don't think I realized how big the arcade market got before there were even video game consoles in the home. I've done all this research and I did not realize how big the arcade market was.

• 24:52David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. This industry, not only was it, did it dwarf the home console industry that the Odyssey started, it dwarfed the personal computer industry. This was the main application of silicon for the 1970s for consumer markets. By the end of the 70s, the total video game arcade market is $5 billion a year, which is already by then, you said in the intro, you know, today, video games are bigger than movies and music. It was already bigger than movies and music by the end of the 70s.

• 25:24Ben Gilbert?

  Huh, that's a narrative violation. I thought this notion of eclipsing Hollywood and music was a recent phenomenon to show how much time people spend in games. But what you're pointing out is that it was a different farm factor and it was a physical location at arcades, but like, that's basically always been true.

• 25:42David Rosenthal?

  Well, it was this ultimate hack to get distribution of this new technology and business into the mass consumer market. People already went to bars and arcades and this was a better product of what they already did. So the industry just took off like wildfire.

• 26:00Ben Gilbert?

  The fascinating thing about this pre-home console era is that there's basically no intellectual property yet because there's no stories yet. These video games are so basic with Pong, with Breakout. It feels silly to compare it to Hollywood because there's not real franchises and characters and stories and anything you can repurpose. You're not going to figure out how to make Pong into a movie or a TV show. There's nothing there.

• 26:28David Rosenthal?

  Right. You could, but it would probably be pretty bad.

• 26:30Ben Gilbert?

  Right. It's a false comparison at this point in history.

• 26:33David Rosenthal?

  Yep. But again, it makes total sense. This came out of arcades, carnivals. You don't need a story here. This is about competition in a public environment.

• 26:40Ben Gilbert?

  Right.

• 26:41David Rosenthal?

  So as Atari really starts to take off through the early and mid 70s, Nolan decides that, hey, they should probably get into the home video game business, too.

• 26:53Ben Gilbert?

  Moore's Law keeps happening. We can now create what used to take a whole cabinet into a small box that you plug into your TV that's purchasable by a consumer rather than costing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's finally happening.

• 27:07David Rosenthal?

  Yep. So they start working on a programmable machine that can play versions of popular arcade hits at the time, and they codename it the VCS, the Video Computer System. Now, as they start working on this, he and the board of Atari realize this is going to be a very different business with different dynamics than the arcade business. And the first and most visceral thing they realize is this is very capital intensive. It takes a lot of firepower to bring a home console to market in the right way. With arcade games, you make the game, you work with a distributor like Midway or Bally or something like that. You get it into arcades and bars and the money comes in. Like, the cash flow cycle is very quick.

• 27:51Ben Gilbert?

  And you make one of the machines and like a thousand people can play it. The way to address a thousand consumers is make a machine and let them flock to the bar to drop quarters in.

• 28:00David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. But in the consumer market, things are very different. You need to get machines into retail and then you need to get retailers and marketers behind what you're doing and build demand amongst consumers for people to, you know, have a reason to go to the store and buy your thing and bring it home.

• 28:17Ben Gilbert?

  And you need to build 100, 1,000 times more machines to address that same set of consumers in their home.

• 28:23David Rosenthal?

  Right. Toys R Us isn't going to buy your product for their stores if you only have 10 of them. They're going to buy your product if you have at least a million of them.

• 28:32Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 28:33David Rosenthal?

  So Silicon Valley has not evolved to the point yet where there are like big growth funds out there that could come in and give Atari a couple hundred million dollars to build up this inventory. So they decide the right thing to do is sell the company. They end up selling it to Warner Brothers in 1976 for $28 million. And this becomes one of the greatest acquisitions of all time for a very brief period. But during that brief period, the payback on Warner Brothers $28 million investment is pretty incredible.

• 29:03Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, that ubiquitous Atari 2600 system that everybody sort of has a fond memory for and recognizes pretty instantly. Basically, all the value of that accrued to Warner Brothers, not the founders and investors in Atari, the independent company.

• 29:16David Rosenthal?

  Yes. So they acquired the company in 1976. 1977, they release the VCS, which gets renamed as the 2600. It's a smash hit. It sells a million units in the first year and then sales double every single year for the next three years. It's so huge that by 1980, just like three years after the 2600 launches, the Atari division of Warner Brothers does $415 million in revenue, which is one third of all of the revenue that Warner Brothers does. Basically, Warner Brothers, the publicly traded Hollywood studio, becomes a video game company for a couple of years.

• 29:58Ben Gilbert?

  That's insane. I had no idea it was that meaningful to Warner.

• 30:03David Rosenthal?

  This is the thing that has just gotten lost to history is that the video game industry took off like almost nothing we've ever even seen to this day.

• 30:11Ben Gilbert?

  Right. I mean, we're building up to this impending crash here, but boy, those first five years were incredible.

• 30:17David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, it is a total gold rush, so much so that Atari is not the only ones making money here. Lots of other toy companies, other media companies decide, hey, they want to get in on this home console video game business too. So Metal enters the market. A toy company called Kaliko enters the market, which actually has its roots in the leather business. It's the Connecticut Leather Company.

• 30:42Ben Gilbert?

  Oh, wow.

• 30:43David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, so everybody's coming into market here.

• 30:46Ben Gilbert?

  And it quickly became. A subcategory of toys in the sort of American consumer psyche. The way that people thought to spend on this is, oh, my eight to 18 year old son needs a toy and it's a big birthday or something. So I'm going to get him a really nice toy, which is going to be one of these video game things.

• 31:07David Rosenthal?

  Yep. And specifically the magic to this and why these became so popular as toys and what informs the whole business model for decades to come is the swappable game cartridges. So if you buy an Atari 2600, you're not just buying a toy for this year or this birthday or this holiday, you're buying toys for the next several years to come.

• 31:32Ben Gilbert?

  And this is like a full lean in on the razor blades razors model, where I'm pretty sure Warner's wasn't actually generating gross margin on the Atari 2600s they were selling. They would make all the money on the games, which has been true even in the modern gaming era. I mean, you look at the incredible amount of firepower in the PlayStations and Xboxes of the last 10 years. Those things sell for the very cheapest they possibly can in order to get an install base so that they can make money on the games. That's what was happening with Atari here, too.

• 32:04David Rosenthal?

  Totally. Everybody's figuring this out all at once, so much so that a few engineers at Atari, after the acquisition, they start to realize this and they think, man, all the money, all the profits are in the software here. What if we leave Atari and we set up a new company that's just going to make games? We're not going to make hardware. We're going to make games for the 2600. So they leave, they actually don't set up a deal with Atari, these guys. They start publishing their own games. They make the cartridges, they sell them on the market themselves.

• 32:37Ben Gilbert?

  Because Atari didn't require you to do a deal with them.

• 32:39David Rosenthal?

  Nobody was thinking about third party developers yet. These guys who left, they knew how to do it because they were Atari employees. So the company they start is a little company called Activision, which is now in the process of being acquired by Microsoft for just about $80 billion, just as a third-party publisher. So Atari ends up suing this new Activision. They're like, hey, you can't do this. They're like fighting it out in court.

• 33:03Ben Gilbert?

  And by the way, the reason they name it Activision is so it comes before Atari in the phone book. I'm pretty sure accolade, there were a handful of A publishers at the time that all had the same idea.

• 33:15David Rosenthal?

  Yep. While they're fighting it out in court, which is just so funny, somebody must have taken a step back at some point and realized, hey, wait a minute. What are we fighting about? There is so much money to be made here. What if we Activision just pay you guys Atari like a royalty fee for every cartridge that we sell? You get 10, 20, 30% away. It doesn't even matter. We're all making so much money. Atari is like, oh yeah, you mean you make the games? You sell them and we just get money? Okay, cool.

• 33:44Ben Gilbert?

  Oh, and we have to take no capital risk on you developing that game? We just make money only if it works? Got it, got it. Yes, please.

• 33:51David Rosenthal?

  Yes, please, indeed. And obviously that works out very, very well for all involved.

• 33:58Ben Gilbert?

  For a time for Atari.

• 34:00David Rosenthal?

  Yes, for a time.

• 34:01Ben Gilbert?

  So you've got this rush of competition coming in for the video game consoles.

• 34:07David Rosenthal?

  Yes, and the problem was it worked too well. Got the parallels to like web three and crypto here, just all over this episode. But there was so much money to be made. Everybody rushed in with a game, game, quote unquote here. Like people were just shoveling any kind of software that they could, both the first parties like Atari, like Mattel and third parties like Activision. They were just trying to get games into stores because people, parents would buy them without knowing what they were. And like, it didn't matter if they were crap. There was just a license to print money.

• 34:43Ben Gilbert?

  And it wasn't just the games. Once people realized the power of this royalty model, they wanted to come out with systems, too. And so you had 15 different companies rush to market in the US with consoles. And so suddenly, these toy stores got flooded both with games and consoles. And as you would imagine, there's intense concentration in the consoles that got selected. There's a real ecosystem effect and network effects that need to be developed for these things to work. And so for a console to be successful, you need a bunch of people buying the console. And once you have a reason for people to develop for your thing,

• 35:23Ben Gilbert?

  then suddenly you actually get the good games, not all the shovelware crap that's hitting the shelves. And so you kind of needed the market to suss out, hey, can we consolidate down to just a few game devices, a few consoles? Because otherwise, nobody knows what to buy, nobody knows what to develop for, and it's just a big mess and the whole thing's going to be a failure as a category.

• 35:48David Rosenthal?

  Yep. The problem was it was so overcrowded and so overfunded, just like things in recent history here in 2023. That didn't happen. Nobody could figure out what was the crap. There was just too much out there.

• 36:01Ben Gilbert?

  Right. The laws of economic physics were broken. And instead of free market dynamics playing out, there was just tons of incentive to just go make more stuff and get it out there, even if it may or may not work.

• 36:11David Rosenthal?

  Yep. So remember I said by 1980, the arcade video game business was a $5 billion annual industry in the United States. By the end of 1982, just two years later, the home video game business is a $3.2 billion industry. Almost as big and combined, you've got a $10 billion industry that just sprung up overnight. Incredible.

• 36:37Ben Gilbert?

  And just to paint where we're going here, that $3.2 billion video game market, that home video game console market in 1982, by 1985 would be worth $100 million, a reduction of 32x in the market size because the entire category just went away.

• 36:59David Rosenthal?

  Just disappeared. To put that differently, a 97% drop in market size within two years. So everybody who came into this industry, the third-party independent software game developers, the hardware guys, Atari, Warner Brothers, Mattel, they just lose their shirts. Because remember, this is still the 1980s. Software has real cogs to it. These are physical packaged goods. These are cartridges and systems with silicon and chips in them.

• 37:31Ben Gilbert?

  And supply chains and labor.

• 37:33David Rosenthal?

  There's billions of dollars of inventory tied up in these companies, in all these systems and games that all of a sudden now is sitting on shelves and can't sell. So all these companies have huge losses. Warner Brothers, publicly traded Warner Brothers Company, like, has to report massive losses, so much so that to appease Wall Street, they have to break up Atari and sell it off. They sell the console business and the games business separately. And Coleco and Mattel completely exit the video game business. The whole industry, the home video game industry is just decimated. It gets dead. This is when the famous ET Atari game, The Cartridge Burial, happens in New Mexico.

• 38:18Ben Gilbert?

  Atari made so many of these ET games that they jointly developed with Universal. And in fact, Steven Spielberg himself was involved in approving the concept of, yes, let's turn ET into a game. The game was so poorly made and the actual game mechanics were so not fun, much like basically every other game at the time. Because you're trying to figure out what console to make it for. You make it for like five consoles. You're rushing to market with this and 16 other games at the same time. Eventually, the quality- Of every single thing that's hitting the market is so low because all the incentives were to just get crap out there that consumers just stopped buying. And so stores just stopped buying upstream, specifically consoles. They kind of stopped buying games, but they really stopped buying consoles,

• 39:02Ben Gilbert?

  except for the one or two or three that are the leading consoles. But even then they're not placing big orders anymore. And that's sort of how you have this whole whip crack effect all the way back upstream to the game makers and the newfound publishers, these third party developers, that the whole thing kind of collapses. The interesting thing with ET is, to your point, they didn't want people discovering the buried games and then reselling them for cheap and compounding the problem even worse. So they like literally took wrecking balls and they're like smashing the cartridges and they bury them in a landfill and they pour concrete on top. And people have gone and like excavated this and looked and this is a real thing that they had to bury all this inventory.

• 39:43David Rosenthal?

  Point is, it was brutal. Now, like you said, Ben, this was the way this industry went to market was as part of the toy industry. So this is actually not anything new for the toy industry.

• 39:57Ben Gilbert?

  Toys are so cyclical.

• 39:59David Rosenthal?

  They're fads. And so the mental model that everybody here in America has for what just happened is, oh, the home video game console was like the hula hoop. Specifically, you know, I mentioned Coleco, which entered the industry. When they get out of the video game industry, the next thing they do is Cabbage Patch Kids dolls. This is just how the toy industry works. You move on to the next thing, you make as much money out of it as you can before the fad, the kids move on and the generation changes.

• 40:25Ben Gilbert?

  It's fad based and it's super seasonal. Basically like Q3, Q4 matters and you're not selling anything Q3, Q1. It's like just the rush up to Christmas. And so everyone's sort of viewing it as, oh, 1982's Christmas toy was the video game console. And oh yeah, it didn't really pan out that people would want those in more future years, but I'm sure we'll find something else.

• 40:46David Rosenthal?

  So here's this opportunity of a lifetime, sitting right there in plain sight for anybody who has the foresight to actually realize this, which is the video game industry, specifically the home video game industry, is not like toys. There actually was incredible product market fit and demand for good games out there. There's a reason why kids wanted this stuff. And the business model of a home video game system is one of the best of all time. We talk on this show about how the software business model is the best business model of all time, and the media business model is the second best business model of all time. Video games are software that is

• 41:31David Rosenthal?

  media. It doesn't get any better than that. You sell a console, whatever, you lose money on the console, who cares? You sell games into homes across America and across the world at 50 bucks a pop, that even with all the manufacturing costs, you're still making 80% gross margin on this stuff. That's pretty incredible. And you can sell three, four, five, 10 of them a year.

• 41:52Ben Gilbert?

  Especially once you flash way forward to games today, there's zero marginal costs to make another copy of the game. There's zero distribution costs because you just ship bits over the internet. And to your point on top, it's media that is software. It's also IP. We're about to tell the Nintendo story here as we transition to Nintendo and how they really find story and characters in an industry that just had, you know, non-human characters, spaceships, and sort of inanimate objects. You have a whole new level on top, which is the durability of IP franchises that is about to come into view for the first time. So you're right, unbelievable business model to produce these games. And if you can

• 42:34Ben Gilbert?

  be sort of the platform maker and get all of the platform network effects that accrue when you are the game console manufacturer, God, you put those two things together, that is a pretty great combo.

• 42:47David Rosenthal?

  Enter Nintendo.

• 42:50Ben Gilbert?

  All right, listeners. Now is a great time to thank our longtime friend of the show, ServiceNow. If you are running a large enterprise, AI agents are likely spread across every team, and deploying them is no longer the hard part.

• 43:04David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, the hard part is knowing what permissions they have, what employees are using them for, or what decisions AI is making. AI security for an enterprise at scale is not a small concern. Like, the risks are real.

• 43:18Ben Gilbert?

  Exactly. And the challenge with AI is governing it, securing it, measuring it, and making sure that it actually delivers value. That is why ServiceNow built the AI Control Tower.

• 43:27David Rosenthal?

  Yep. AI Control Tower gives enterprises a single place to see, manage, govern, and optimize AI across the entire business. And it works with any AI, not just theirs. Every device on your network, every permission across every system, every AI agent, visible and secure in one place.

• 43:45Ben Gilbert?

  And ServiceNow can do this because they've spent more than 20 years building the operational backbone of the enterprise: the workflows, governance, approvals, security controls, and institutional knowledge that power how work actually gets done across IT, HR, customer service, finance, and security.

• 44:01David Rosenthal?

  ServiceNow already runs more than 100 billion workflows annually, and trillions of transactions for more than 85% of the Fortune 500. So when companies need a place to govern AI at enterprise scale, they're building on a platform at the center of how their business already operates.

• 44:18Ben Gilbert?

  And in a future that isn't going to be one AI, it's going to be thousands of AI agents working across every function of the company. But the question is, who's managing them all?

• 44:27David Rosenthal?

  So if you're trying to turn AI ambition into real business outcomes and make it work safely, securely, at scale, go check out servicenow.com/acquired and tell them that Ben and David sent you.

• 44:38Ben Gilbert?

  Okay, David, as we get into the Nintendo story here, there is one thing I think that's important listeners to know before we flashback and tell Nintendo from day one, which is the US video game market is decimated. But in Japan, for home game consoles that were just starting to really find their footing around 1983, they kind of resisted the urge to import all of these American consoles that were flying off shelves. And so in Japan, you had a completely different dynamic, which was there were only a few consoles, but they were selling quite well and they didn't have a ton of competition.

• 45:19Ben Gilbert?

  So there actually was a moment in the Japanese market to look around and observe when we make high-quality games, people totally want to buy them and pay for them. And knowing that might give us an advantage in entering other markets, too.

• 45:34David Rosenthal?

  Totally. So Nintendo, we go back to 1889, 100 years earlier, in Kyoto, Japan, when one Fusa Jiro Yamouchi, who was the head of a cement company at the time in Kyoto. Yamouchi was actually not his original family name. He had become the head of the cement company because he had worked in it. And the person who ran and owned the cement company was ready to retire. He didn't have any male heirs to take over the company, which is how companies transitioned in Japan. And so what you did in that case was you adopted

• 46:17David Rosenthal?

  a male heir to take over the company. So Fusa Jiro was actually born Fusa Jiro Fuki, but he took on the Yamouchi family name to inherit this cement company.

• 46:31David Rosenthal?

  Now, similar to Nolan, many, many years later in America, Fuzujiro was looking around for interesting new technologies and how he might apply it to a market that he knew had universal appeal, which was playing games and specifically playing games for money. He saw that there was an opportunity to get out of the cement business, the boring cement business, and enter the playing card business. And so he sets up a new company. He names it Nintendo. And the name Nintendo is actually a multiple entendre. So the Kanji characters, nin, ten, and do can be interpreted as leave luck to heaven, which of course references luck in playing cards. It also may be the entrepreneurial spirit of a new venture.

• 47:16Ben Gilbert?

  But definitely plays on the fact that they're a gambling company.

• 47:19David Rosenthal?

  Well, that's what I was gonna say. Specifically, the character ten at the time was a clear reference to the sort of mythical spirit, ten-gu, which was a coded reference for gambling and casinos, which were very, very, very much still illegal at the time. Now, why did Fuzujiro see the opportunity here? Playing cards and card games had originally entered Japan from the West in the 1500s. But then they'd been banned for hundreds of years when Japan's rulers followed a strict isolationist policy and basically kicked all Western influence out of the country. I think I knew this, but I had forgotten until doing the research. Do you know how they did that? The rulers

• 48:01David Rosenthal?

  of Japan for this multiple hundred-year period from the 1500s to the 1800s?

• 48:05Ben Gilbert?

  No.

• 48:06David Rosenthal?

  They institute the death penalty for any foreigners who entered Japan and any Japanese who leave the country.

• 48:14Ben Gilbert?

  Whoa.

• 48:15David Rosenthal?

  So like, they meant it. All Western influence out of Japan. This goes on for hundreds of years.

• 48:21Ben Gilbert?

  Wait, if you entered the country, it was just so illegal that they would kill you?

• 48:26David Rosenthal?

  Yes.

• 48:26Ben Gilbert?

  Oh, my God.

• 48:27David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 48:29Ben Gilbert?

  I feel like I missed this part of world history.

• 48:31David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, but human nature is human nature. And even despite this very strict effort to eliminate Western influence from Japanese society, the allure of playing games and gambling for money is too strong to resist. And so during that time, the playing card system developed a kind of substitute parallel track in Japan called, instead of the Western deck, the Hanafuda cards. And instead of four suits, these cards had four seasons. And instead of 13 numbers and faces on the cards, they had 12 months of the year, but used for basically the same purpose, which is games of gambling.

• 49:16David Rosenthal?

  So by the late 1880s, after the Meiji Restoration, the government had finally removed the official ban on playing cards. So Hanafuda cards existed for hundreds of years, but even they were like underground. Finally, now you could legally produce these things. And so that's why Yamayuki starts Nintendo. So Nintendo becomes quite successful in this new industry, so successful, in fact, that they become the largest playing card manufacturer in Japan. You think like, cool, that's great. Interesting business, you know, playing cards, fun games. I can see maybe how that leads to, you know, what Nintendo becomes. If you think about it a little more, though, playing cards are now legal in Japan.

• 50:00David Rosenthal?

  Gambling is not, though. And what is the main use of playing cards? Well, it's gambling. Who are the primary customers for playing cards? It's not households.

• 50:11Ben Gilbert?

  Okay, so anybody who's operating an illegal casino, basically.

• 50:15David Rosenthal?

  It's organized crime. It's the Yakuza in Japan, the Japanese mafia.

• 50:19Ben Gilbert?

  Whoa. I had heard whispers that there was some Yakuza involvement in Nintendo's history, but I didn't find anything about it. What do you got?

• 50:28David Rosenthal?

  Well, so the Yakuza operated gambling parlors and casinos all throughout the country. And there, just like at casinos in America, when they play games with cards, they use a fresh pack of cards for every game because you don't want to have cheating. This is an incredible business. What an incredible customer for Nintendo. These gaming parlors run by the Yakuza who need thousands and thousands of packs of cards.

• 50:55Ben Gilbert?

  Wow.

• 50:56David Rosenthal?

  Very, very successful business and a quite interesting distribution capability that Nintendo builds up over these 50-plus years that they're just a playing cards company.

• 51:09Ben Gilbert?

  Wow. So on this show, we talk a lot about value chain and where power accrues in a value chain and how you get power as a company. It doesn't feel like you want your biggest customer to be the Yakuza. And it doesn't feel like you want them controlling your destiny.

• 51:25David Rosenthal?

  Maybe, maybe not. I mean, if you can navigate that successfully, you can really develop quite a lot of power within a market.

• 51:33Ben Gilbert?

  It's so interesting because in the US, the early arcade games industry was sort of the same way. It was also a mafia thing.

• 51:40David Rosenthal?

  We talked about this with Nolan. Yeah. And that is 100% the roots of Nintendo. So Fusagiro Yamayuki runs this business for a number of decades quite successfully. He ends up having the same problem that his adopted father, the original cement entrepreneur, had before him, which is when it comes time for him to retire, he doesn't have a male heir. So he arranges for his daughter to marry a promising local young man named Sekiro Kaneda. And Sekiro also changes his name to Yamayuki. He becomes the, at this point now, third coming of the mythical Yamayuki and the second

• 52:24David Rosenthal?

  president of actual Nintendo itself. Sekiro also doesn't have any male heirs. So for the third time, the Yamayuki patriarch arranges to adopt an heir to run the business in the future. And specifically, Sekiro arranges for his eldest daughter, Kimi, to marry another promising young local man. Shikinojo Inaba. Shikinojo also adopts the Yamouchi name. He starts being groomed to take over the business. And then finally, in 1927, he and Kimi have a son, the first Yamouchi son in three generations. And they name him Hiroshi Yamouchi. Unfortunately, here's where things start to go

• 53:07David Rosenthal?

  pretty terribly wrong for Nintendo.

• 53:10Ben Gilbert?

  And what year are we in?

• 53:11David Rosenthal?

  We're in 1932, so this is before the war. Hiroshi is five years old. Shikinojo walks out on the family and abandons the business, the family, son, and leaves. Nobody knows exactly why. This is kind of lost to history, but I got to imagine between all the pressure, the family, the business, the Yakuza connections, there's a lot going on here. His mother, Kimi, also kind of never recovers from this incident. She basically also leaves the family. So Hiroshi Yamouchi, the first actual Yamouchi born in generations, is pretty much orphaned at this point. His grandparents, Sekiro and his wife,

• 53:54David Rosenthal?

  adopt him, but they're not parenting him. Not to mention that World War II happens when he's an early teenager. The life that he grows up in is quite, quite, quite difficult. Finally, when he's 18, the war is over. He makes what I assume must have maybe been like a deal with his family and his grandfather. He escapes Kyoto and goes to Tokyo to study law at Wasada University. But in exchange for being able to do that, the family and his grandfather arranges a marriage for him as well to the daughter of a formerly high-ranking Samurai family. And then, pretty much right after this happens, a couple of years later in 1948.

• 54:38David Rosenthal?

  Sekiro suddenly has a massive stroke and is completely incapacitated.

• 54:43Ben Gilbert?

  This is Hiroshi's grandfather.

• 54:45David Rosenthal?

  This is Hiroshi's grandfather and can no longer run the business. And so he summons Hiroshi back from Tokyo, from law school to Kyoto, and commands him to take over the family business to become the next Yamayuki running Nintendo.

• 55:02Ben Gilbert?

  Wow. And this is pretty young to take over the family business.

• 55:06David Rosenthal?

  He's 21 years old because his father had walked out on him and the family. There was this missing generation here. And then his grandfather, who he has this very complicated relationship with, has this sudden stroke and all of a sudden Hiroshi has to come back and take over the business.

• 55:22Ben Gilbert?

  Now, listeners, the crazy thing is you might be thinking, wow, so this guy probably has no idea how to run this business. It's unlikely that it would be successful. Interestingly, he develops into a leader who has an unbelievable eye, this killer taste. We're going to flash way forward, like what games are fun and what games are not fun by not even playing them, like observing them for like a half hour. And he's like, this is going to be a winner. It's amazing that out of basically no training and no real apprenticeship in the business turns into this oracle of fun.

• 56:02David Rosenthal?

  He comes back to Kyoto. He takes over the family business. He waits until Sekiro finally dies, which the writing was on the wall, happens in 1949. As soon as that happens, he institutes a massive purge. He fires not just anyone who was loyal to Sekiro in the company. He fires every single manager in Nintendo, just decapitates everybody. He doesn't literally burn the company to the ground, but he just about burns the company to the ground.

• 56:31Ben Gilbert?

  So there's basically like no more institutional memory of a leader other than him in the entire organization.

• 56:37David Rosenthal?

  Yes, and there is no question who the new Yamayuki is going forward and who is in charge here.

• 56:44Ben Gilbert?

  Wow.

• 56:44David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, totally crazy.

• 56:47Ben Gilbert?

  And so we're in, what, 1950 ish when he takes over?

• 56:51David Rosenthal?

  1948, 1949.

• 56:53Ben Gilbert?

  Okay.

• 56:53David Rosenthal?

  When this happens. So Hiroshi, though, like you said, for the first time, he's 21 years old. Like, he's a young man. He doesn't want his life to be shackled by like what Nintendo and the Yamouchi family has always been historically. So he's looking around for ways to make Nintendo his own. And finally, in 1959, the perfect opportunity arises. The Walt Disney Company is looking to enter Japan.

• 57:21Ben Gilbert?

  It's crazy that Disney comes into the story, especially because there's so many parallels between Nintendo's identity as a business and the thing that makes them great. And Disney, it's crazy that what lands on his doorstep is Walt Disney calling.

• 57:35David Rosenthal?

  Also, given what Nintendo's business is, what we just spent 20 minutes describing, Disney's like, oh, yeah, these are the guys we're gonna work with in Japan.

• 57:43Ben Gilbert?

  Right. Oh, yeah. We're a family-friendly brand that has to protect our brand safety above all else. How about these guys that do business with the mob?

• 57:51David Rosenthal?

  But the reason they do it is the way that they want to enter Japan is with playing cards. So Nintendo licenses Walt Disney characters and puts them on playing cards. And they sell playing cards to kids in Japan.

• 58:08Ben Gilbert?

  I gotta buy some of these. If these still exist somewhere on eBay, I gotta go find some.

• 58:13David Rosenthal?

  Oh, I bet they do. Some of the documentaries I watched, there's, you know, photos and video footage of them. So you can probably find them somewhere. We gotta put these in the acquired museum.

• 58:21Ben Gilbert?

  Wow. Nintendo branded Japanese Disney cards.

• 58:25David Rosenthal?

  So this is what Yamouchi, the, I guess, fourth at this point in time, Hiroshi, is looking for. This is the opportunity. Not only does this open up a new market and a new distribution channel, the kids market, the toys market, the legitimate retail for Nintendo. There's just an incredible opportunity to draft off the Disney brand. So they start with playing cards. Then they start licensing from Disney other kids toys to sell in Japan. And then they go to the retailers and they say, hey, you like carrying these Disney toys? If you're going to carry the Disney toys, you need to carry some Nintendo branded toys along with them.

• 59:08Ben Gilbert?

  It is amazing. It's this story that we tell over and over and over again on Acquired, where you acquire something, some asset, that then gives you a leg up in a different part of your business. And now it's a self fulfilling prophecy where that other part of your business is made better. And so by having a scarce commodity, Disney branded cards, they get power over the distributors. So now you actually have a reason to be in stores. And now that you're in stores, it doesn't matter how you got there. You have that channel, you have those relationships. And especially if you can hold them captive and say, you have to distribute our stuff with Disney stuff, then it's a pretty good bargaining position.

• 59:47David Rosenthal?

  So during the 1960s, Nintendo transforms itself into a Japanese toy company. They are making things like the Ultra Hand, which is like a extended grabber. I know you did some research on this.

• 1:00:01Ben Gilbert?

  This is awesome. So this guy Gunpei Yokoi in 1970 comes up with an idea. We're like breezing through history here, but we kind of have to. It's 100 years. So, you know, we went from 1949 with Hiroshi taking over to 1959 when the Disney comes in. Flash forward down to 1970, Yokoi comes up with this telescoping fake hand, basically as a gag. And Hiroshi Yamauchi looks at it and he goes, that looks like a winner. Cause this guy, he's just so good at identifying things that consumers are going to love. And so they market as the Ultra Hand. I mean, truly, he made it as like a gag around the office. They sell 1.2 million products of this Ultra Hand.

• 1:00:46Ben Gilbert?

  Of course, then they're all looking around, they're like, oh, we should become a novelty toy company all out. Like, that's what we should do. So they come up with, I think, the 10 billion barrel maze. They have a love tester device that they market. They have a remote control vacuum like 30 years before Roomba. And so they're just coming up with crazy toys in the lab and bringing them to market.

• 1:01:08David Rosenthal?

  All these zany gadgets. And because they have this Disney Sword of Damocles that they can hang over retailers' heads, they know they're going to get the retailers to carry all this stuff. It's amazing. So you mentioned Gunpei Yokoi. He was a tech on the playing card assembly line, maintaining the machines within Nintendo. And to your point about Yamouchi, just has this sixth sense for products and for talent. He plucks him off the assembly line and says, you are now the chief designer, the chief engineer for Nintendo. That's crazy. Gunpei would go on to design the Game Boy and the Virtual Boy. He would run the Metroid series and he would be the first boss and mentor of one Shigeru Miyamoto. Ooh.

• 1:01:53David Rosenthal?

  So amazingly now, by the late 60s, early 70s, Nintendo has become a toy company and a very profitable one at that. So Yamouchi starts investing in a whole bunch of other stuff. And one of the things he invests in is failed bowling alleys. What? Bowling was this incredible fad that had taken Japan by hold in the late 60s. And so all these bowling alleys got built. But then society lost interest in them and so there are all these empty bowling alleys. Yamouchi goes and buys up these bowling alleys. And he directs Gunpei to say like, hey, come up with some gadgets that we can put in here and we can attract people to these bowling alleys.

• 1:02:35David Rosenthal?

  And they decide that they can use some of the technology that Gunpei is building for toys to make indoor shooting ranges, light gun shooting ranges, like not laser tag, more like clay pigeons, but like simulating shooting ranges indoor in these former bowling alleys. They do this, this goes pretty well. This becomes another big thing. So this is kind of random, Nintendo getting into indoor light gun shooting ranges. But actually, this becomes the critical thing that pushes them into the video game market for a bunch of reasons. One, This gets Nintendo into the arcade business. Because what else do you put in bowling alleys and indoor shooting ranges? But arcade machines.

• 1:03:20David Rosenthal?

  So Gunpei and Yamouchi and the rest of the company. Start making their own arcade games that they can put into their shooting ranges and bowling alleys. At first, these are electromechanical games like Sega. But once Pong becomes a thing and comes over to Japan and arcade video games. They get into it too, and Nintendo starts making their own arcade video games. Two for Nintendo. These light gun ranges that they start building. They become pretty good at it. And they decide that they can export the technology to North America and Europe. So this is actually the first product that Nintendo starts exporting out of Japan is this technology.

• 1:04:04David Rosenthal?

  And they do it using trading companies to start. So they're not setting up their own distribution internationally yet. But they start building relationships with American companies. And three, and this is kind of just unbelievable here. The light gun business gets them into a relationship with Magnavox. Remember Magnavox from the beginning of the episode?

• 1:04:27Ben Gilbert?

  Oh yeah, the Odyssey.

• 1:04:29David Rosenthal?

  Specifically for the launch of the Odyssey in America. So the Odyssey came with a bunch of peripherals for use in the games on the console. One of the peripherals was a light gun.

• 1:04:48Ben Gilbert?

  Whoa.

• 1:04:49David Rosenthal?

  And who made the light gun for the Magnavox Odyssey? Nintendo.

• 1:04:55Ben Gilbert?

  That is the most circuitous path to finding their way into American home video consoles. But it makes sense.

• 1:05:01David Rosenthal?

  Right, you cannot script this any better. Nintendo, who, single-handedly in a minute, comes in and dominates not just the American, but the worldwide market for home video game consoles and builds this incredible juggernaut around the world. They were right there, part of the very first home video game console launched in America by Magnavox.

• 1:05:22Ben Gilbert?

  Wow. But in a way that sort of lets them observe this market without having to push their chips in on this market.

• 1:05:28David Rosenthal?

  Well, let's take the story from there. So they build this relationship with Magnavox. They see that the Odyssey, despite Magnavox's having no idea how to market this thing, is succeeding despite itself in America. They're like, well, we're in the toy business in Japan. This thing might actually do decently here in Japan. So they license the Odyssey from Magnavox. And Nintendo rebrands and starts distributing the Magnavox Odyssey through its toy retailer channels in Japan.

• 1:06:00Ben Gilbert?

  Oh, I had no idea that before the NES, they had their own Japanese distribution of a home video console.

• 1:06:07David Rosenthal?

  This, all from these crazy light gun ranges, this is what gets Nintendo into the video game business. So they start selling the Odyssey in Japan. And then pretty quickly, they actually just license a bunch of the tech from Magnavox and start making their own modified consoles. So in 1975 is when they licensed the Odyssey. The next year in 1976, they take a bunch of that tech and they make their own Nintendo home video game console, the very first one that they make, the Color TV Game 6. And it's just kind of a Odyssey knockoff, just more localized for Japan and maybe a little better tech.

• 1:06:50David Rosenthal?

  But the same thing, it only plays a couple of simplistic games, one of which is table tennis. It becomes a huge hit, just like the Odyssey. That Color TV Game 6 sells a million units in Japan.

• 1:07:01Ben Gilbert?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:07:01David Rosenthal?

  This is like transformative for Nintendo.

• 1:07:03Ben Gilbert?

  And what year is this?

• 1:07:05David Rosenthal?

  1976.

• 1:07:06Ben Gilbert?

  Okay, so this is kind of before the success of the US-based home console rush.

• 1:07:13David Rosenthal?

  A hundred percent. Nintendo is very early to the market, just in their own unique way, isolated to Japan, but they're learning everything along the way. The next year, they follow the Color TV Game 6 up with a new model, the Color TV Game 15, plays 15 games instead of six games.

• 1:07:31Ben Gilbert?

  I was like, why are they calling it the six? Okay.

• 1:07:33David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. Cause remember, these are not cartridge-based consoles yet.

• 1:07:36Ben Gilbert?

  Oh.

• 1:07:37David Rosenthal?

  You're not selling programmable software for them.

• 1:07:39Ben Gilbert?

  Huh.

• 1:07:40David Rosenthal?

  So that sells another 1 million units. And together, these consoles, like I said, totally transform the company. They're making much better margins on these things. They can sell them for a higher stair price than the Ultra Hand and the other toys that they're selling.

• 1:07:55Ben Gilbert?

  Right.

• 1:07:55David Rosenthal?

  The shooting gun ranges, that's a fad that goes the way of the bowling alley in Japan. So this is what Nintendo becomes, kind of inadvertently. They become a Japanese video game business.

• 1:08:06Ben Gilbert?

  A pseudo importer reseller.

• 1:08:08David Rosenthal?

  Yep.

• 1:08:10Ben Gilbert?

  That's crazy. By the way, do you know how the light gun works? And why that was such a leap forward?

• 1:08:17David Rosenthal?

  No.

• 1:08:18Ben Gilbert?

  So this was a very clever invention by Nintendo's engineers. You could imagine that the way a light gun, the most intuitive way for it to work would be, well, you take a regular gun that shoots bullets out of it. And instead, you make it shoot some kind of laser out of it. But what that would require is for the TV, the target, to have a detector on it, which you really don't want to have to force that constraint. That sounds really hard, especially when you're trying to work with a lot of different TVs.

• 1:08:45David Rosenthal?

  Ironic that later Nintendo would force that constraint with the Wii.

• 1:08:49Ben Gilbert?

  Right, right. Isn't that funny? So they flipped it on its head. They figured out that actually what we should be doing is we should make the gun the detector. And we should specialize what's coming on the screen.

• 1:09:02David Rosenthal?

  Oh, that's super cool.

• 1:09:04Ben Gilbert?

  There's like a one frame thing that happens. And I think that you can still see this in the early Duck Hunt games. But basically, the screen flashes one frame where only the target is lit up and the gun is the detector. And if in the gun's sight, it sees the set of pixels that are lit on the one frame, then it knows it got a hit. And if it doesn't detect those pixels, then it's a miss.

• 1:09:28David Rosenthal?

  No way. I always wondered how Duck Hunt worked. I had no idea.

• 1:09:32Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, pretty cool.

• 1:09:33David Rosenthal?

  That's amazing.

• 1:09:36David Rosenthal?

  So Nintendo, thanks to this relationship with Magnavox, is in this incredibly privileged position in this new industry. They have a bird's eye view into the American home video game industry, and they're learning all the lessons from what's happening there.

• 1:09:52Ben Gilbert?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:09:53David Rosenthal?

  They're also pioneering and establishing themselves as the leader in the Japanese video game industry. So they're in a great spot through all of this. They see, come 1977, when Atari and Warner Brothers releases the VCS 2600 in America, the Yamauchi, even despite not being an engineer, is like, clearly, this is the future.

• 1:10:20Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 1:10:20David Rosenthal?

  This piece of hardware not only is so much better than all this dedicated stuff that's like the Odyssey and like what we've been doing that came before, but the business model implications of this, you know, the razor and blades model, the interchangeable cartridges, selling software. We gotta get into this game.

• 1:10:39Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 1:10:40David Rosenthal?

  But they also see, things are crazy over in America. Everybody's rushing into this industry.

• 1:10:45Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, they gotta be very judicious here. It's a very attractive market to enter, but they have to figure out a way to differentiate and not make all the same exact mistakes that everyone else is making and rush in with crap products that eventually people are going to stop buying. They have to figure out how to sell something interesting, durable, and unique.

• 1:11:04David Rosenthal?

  So Yamauchi makes an incredibly foresighted decision here. He says, "We Nintendo need to build a programmable home video game console, like the Atari 2600. But whereas Atari and all these other American companies, they're rushing their consoles to market. This is, if not shoddy hardware, like the development cycles for these consoles are like maybe a year, a year and a half. We have the luxury here in Japan because there's not direct competition. Let's take our time and let's make something really amazing."

• 1:11:41Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. Not to mention that by taking a long cycle development time, they actually get the benefit of Moore's Law. They get to come out with something a few years later that is much, much better.

• 1:11:52David Rosenthal?

  Exactly. So he starts a project in the late 70s within Nintendo to develop their first programmable ROM cartridge, swappable software, home video game console. But he's willing to take a very long view and he instructs the team. I want this device that we produce to be at least one year ahead of any competitors on the market, anywhere in the world. And I want us to be able to sell this thing for the equivalent of $75.

• 1:12:25Ben Gilbert?

  And on top of that, I want us to be unit economic positive on these machines. I want every game system that we sell to be profitable for us. And this is completely contrary to the rest of the industry who's like, oh yeah, this is a razors and blades thing. We're happy to subsidize so that we can sell more games. He's like, we're going to do it all on hard mode and we're just going to take years to do it. Cause this is 77 when he's saying this, the NES won't debut in the US until 1985.

• 1:12:55David Rosenthal?

  And not in Japan until 1983. So it kind of reminds me of the old saying, you can have high quality. You can have cheap and good prices and you can have something done quickly, but you can only choose two out of three. And so Yamauchi says, the constraint I'm going to relax here is time, which is what nobody else in the video game market is doing.

• 1:13:16Ben Gilbert?

  So it's 1977. What are they going to do in the meantime? Well, R and D is super, you know, heads down and secretive on building what becomes the famicom and the NES.

• 1:13:28David Rosenthal?

  Yep. Yamauchi splits Nintendo's R and D teams from one singular team that's working on all of their video game business into multiple teams. And he takes the new team, the R and D two team, and he dedicates them to this home console project. And says, you have years, you don't have unlimited budget, you have a lot of constraints, but make this thing amazing. The original R and D team, the R and D one team, he says, you guys keep working on the line of tech that we already have, the dedicated home consoles, and let's explore some other ways to use this technology to make money. That leads to the game and watch business, which is this total dead end in video games

• 1:14:10David Rosenthal?

  and technology, but was insanely profitable for Nintendo for a couple of years. I played one dedicated game per machine. It actually comes from the calculator industry is where they take this tech. It becomes the spiritual forerunner of the Game Boy, but this type of product is particularly suited to the Japanese and broader Asian markets. Like it's portable, you can play it anywhere, you can play it on the go. It does really well for Nintendo.

• 1:14:33Ben Gilbert?

  Much lower price point.

• 1:14:35David Rosenthal?

  Much lower price point. They sell millions of these things in the late seventies and early eighties in Japan, which keeps financing the other R and D team.

• 1:14:43Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 1:14:44David Rosenthal?

  Also, they haven't forgotten about the arcade side of the business, too. Yamouchi spins up a third R and D team just to focus on making arcade titles because he also knows that software is going to be really important for this eventual home console.

• 1:14:58Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. They're basically saying, we want to learn what games are great. And once we have a stable of those great games, then we can unleash them on whatever our next generation console ends up being. But for now, we kind of need to like create a bunch of games in the arcades in cabinets so we can know what the hits are going to be. And I will say, to know what the hits are going to be, basically none of them were at first. So I imagine there was like a year at Nintendo over in Japan where they're hitting the oh crap button, where they're like, uh, we may not have any good games to put on this thing.

• 1:15:36David Rosenthal?

  Fortunately, the console wasn't ready yet. There's one more piece of the puzzle, though, and that's that he needs to get a foothold in the American market so that they can get distribution relationships there and actually be able to enter it.

• 1:15:50Ben Gilbert?

  And ideally, in his mind, to be their own distributor. Nintendo is really obsessed, especially at this point in history, with not getting commoditized and not having to fork over 50% to this middleman and then another 50% to that middleman. It's like, no, no, we need to get directly to customers.

• 1:16:06David Rosenthal?

  Right. They've been using trading companies to export the light gun tech and other things. They want to set up their own distribution. But grudgingly.

• 1:16:15David Rosenthal?

  The Yamouche family cycle is going to repeat itself. As much as Hiroshi hates it, he knows the perfect person to set up Nintendo of America. His son-in-law.

• 1:16:29Ben Gilbert?

  Who does not want to work in Nintendo.

• 1:16:31David Rosenthal?

  Who definitely doesn't want to do it. And whose wife, Hiroshi's daughter, absolutely does not want him to do it. Minoru Arakawa.

• 1:16:41Ben Gilbert?

  All right, listeners. Now is a great time to talk about a new partner of ours here on Acquired. Logora, the agentic operating system that is redefining how the world's best legal teams work.

• 1:16:54David Rosenthal?

  Yep, it's sort of obvious that AI is going to completely change the legal industry. I bet most of you listening have dropped a contract into some sort of AI chatbot out there. Logora took that insight and asked the question, what if you really built something with that power from the ground up for the legal industry?

• 1:17:11Ben Gilbert?

  So the founders did exactly what great founders do. Operate with obsessive customer focus. They embedded inside a massive law firm for months. They sat with the lawyers just watching how the work really gets done.

• 1:17:26David Rosenthal?

  And that's how you get features that customers love, like tabular review, where you drop in a folder of hundreds of contracts and it pulls every key term into a grid a lawyer can actually work with. Logora's bet here is interesting. Since it lets each lawyer handle more complexity, any given person can increase the quality of their work and do higher value work. And this means that the pie can grow even as each individual task takes less time.

• 1:17:50Ben Gilbert?

  And they recently launched Logora Agent, offering greater intelligence and performance. The agent lets lawyers set an objective. Then it can handle the planning and the execution and delivery of the final product. Legal teams get to maintain full control and transparency since they're still involved where judgment is required.

• 1:18:09David Rosenthal?

  And Logora works where you already work. You can use it within Microsoft Word while redlining or drafting. The early Logora numbers essentially speak for themselves. When they have a head-to-head pilot with their top competitor, they win 70% of the time. Logora now has over 100,000 lawyers on the platform from 1,200 legal teams in 50 countries. And crazily, they went from 1 million to 100 million in ARR in about 18 months.

• 1:18:39Ben Gilbert?

  Truly insane numbers, and that is the real test. Plenty of things demo well, but the question is whether a busy associate actually reaches for it during crunch time, or whether a partner trusts it before going into a conversation with a major client. If your legal team wants to check it out, whether you're a law firm or you're in-house at a company, you can learn more at lagora.com/acquired and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. All right, we're heading into the 80s. It's going to be Nintendo's decade. Over there, they have a four-pronged strategy. Bring me to Radar Scope, David. I'm jonesing for it. And listeners, unless you're like Nintendo history buffs, you're like Radar Scope,

• 1:19:20Ben Gilbert?

  but Radar Scope would be the ashes from which all of the phoenixes you know about rise.

• 1:19:28David Rosenthal?

  So Arakawa, Yamayuchi's chosen son-in-law begrudgingly, who he sends over to set up Nintendo of America. Unlike other son-in-laws in the Nintendo family history, has a bit of a different background. So he is also from a very prominent, high society, well-respected family in Kyoto. But he left Japan and went to America for his education. He went to MIT, where he was educated as an engineer, and he fell in love with America.

• 1:20:04Ben Gilbert?

  And he may have fallen in love with the distance from his father-in-law, too. A whole ocean in the way is pretty nice.

• 1:20:10David Rosenthal?

  Well, this is before he met Yoko, his wife.

• 1:20:12Ben Gilbert?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:20:13David Rosenthal?

  When he comes back to Japan, he meets Yoko at a Christmas ball while Yoko's in college. And Yoko wants nothing to do, just like Hiroshi before her, wants nothing to do with Nintendo, nothing to do with her father, nothing to do with the family business. And she's kind of taken by Arakawa, in part because he loves America, he's so different. Like, there's no way that history's going to repeat itself here.

• 1:20:38Ben Gilbert?

  Right. If I don't want to be involved with Nintendo, then this guy's probably that ticket.

• 1:20:43David Rosenthal?

  He's my ticket.

• 1:20:45David Rosenthal?

  So they get married and they move to Vancouver in Canada, where Arakawa becomes a very successful real estate developer. Yoko loves it there. They come back home to Kyoto to visit family, and Yamayuchi makes his pitch.

• 1:21:03David Rosenthal?

  So Arakawa's intrigued, but you know, he's got a successful business of his own, right? And he loves his wife. His marriage is very important to him. And he knows that if he accepts here, he's going to be in a real tough spot. But Yamouchi says, hey, I'm not asking here. You kind of need to do this.

• 1:21:25Ben Gilbert?

  And there's a little negotiation. I think they strike an economic deal that makes it very much worth Arakawa's time and Arakawa's strong belief is I have to be in America and do it my own way, rather than me sort of starting to take over the company in Japan.

• 1:21:43David Rosenthal?

  This is part of the deal that convinces both Yoko and Minaru to do this. Yamouchi says, I'll let you run things your way in America.

• 1:21:54Ben Gilbert?

  Big concession.

• 1:21:55David Rosenthal?

  But I know you live in Vancouver. I want you to move to New York City. Because New York City is where the toy industry is headquartered in America. And you got to go build relationships there. So they have a mandate to set up Nintendo of America in New York, which they do. And at first, you know, there's no console yet. They're not ready to enter the home video game market, but they've got these arcade machines. And so the way that they're going to build up Nintendo of America is through the arcade business. They do the obvious first thing that makes sense. They hire the guys who had been running the trading company that was importing Nintendo's arcade machines in the past.

• 1:22:33Ben Gilbert?

  And I think they were importing used Nintendo arcade games from Japan and like refurbishing them and then selling them into US bars and arcades. Like it was this very, almost like gray market way to acquire Nintendo's cabinets.

• 1:22:51David Rosenthal?

  That was run by two young guys at the time who were from Seattle, University of Washington alums, Al Stone and Ron Judy. That becomes the initial Seattle link for Nintendo of America. So they hire Stone and Judy to sell Nintendo's arcade games that they're producing back in Japan. And to no one's surprise, they don't sell very well. The games just weren't very good.

• 1:23:18Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:19David Rosenthal?

  And there was pretty robust competition, of course, as we talked about in the American market. So Arakawa's like, Guys, why are these not selling? Rana and I are like, they're not selling because the games suck. You need to call up Yamouchi-san and be like, hey, send us some better product. They say, you know, what is selling here? We're now in 1978, 1979 in America. What is selling is Space Invaders. That's made by a Japanese arcade company, Tito. Why don't you get the guys back in Japan to make something like Space Invaders and send it over to us? So Minaru calls up Yamouchi and is like, hey, can you send us something like Space Invaders?

• 1:24:00David Rosenthal?

  Yamouchi doesn't really want to do it because he's like, look, you're just supposed to be building relationships over there. Can't you just use our games? And Arakawa is like, no, no, I really think this is going to sell. I'm going to place a really, really big order. I want you to send me 3,000 cabinets of a Space Invaders knockoff. Like, I really know that this is going to work.

• 1:24:24Ben Gilbert?

  Yep, we are your boots on the ground. We know this market. It has to work.

• 1:24:27David Rosenthal?

  Yep, I'm putting my reputation with you on the line. I know you don't know me that well as, you know, a business partner yet, but I really think this is going to work. Yamouchi says, okay. He directs the R&D3 team to come up with a Space Invaders knockoff, which they do. They make radar scope. It's innovative. It has a different perspective. It's not the top-down Space Invaders. It's got like a three-quarters view quasi-3D twist on the Space Invaders mechanic. They start producing them in Japan. Unfortunately, to make the games from scratch, build them in Japan and then ship them over to New York, which takes a long time on the water to ship them. It takes four months.

• 1:25:09David Rosenthal?

  During this time, the American Space Invaders mania peaks and starts to die off.

• 1:25:16Ben Gilbert?

  And this is pretty much the last time that Nintendo will pursue the strategy of something is hot. Every single success that Nintendo has from here on out is from their own discovery of something fun, from being inventive and from taking risk. And that means it will come with failures, too. But from this point forward, they never try the fast-follow, clone, copy thing again.

• 1:25:42David Rosenthal?

  Totally. So when the cabinets show up, Nintendo of America can't sell them. And they've got all this capital tied up in this inventory. They only managed to sell about 1,000 of the 3,000 cabinets.

• 1:25:54Ben Gilbert?

  So they got 2,000 Radar Scope cabinets sitting in a warehouse in New Jersey at the current headquarters of Nintendo of America, collecting dust.

• 1:26:05David Rosenthal?

  So Minoru now needs to call up Yamayuki again.

• 1:26:08Ben Gilbert?

  And be like, you were right.

• 1:26:11David Rosenthal?

  Be like, so about, you know, when I kind of put my neck on the line with these Radar Scope cabinets, I was wrong. You can only imagine how this conversation went.

• 1:26:21Ben Gilbert?

  Oh.

• 1:26:22David Rosenthal?

  And he's like, we gotta do something. Like, we can't, you know, Nintendo of America's gonna go bankrupt with all this inventory and these cabinets just sitting here. Can you get somebody to reprogram some new chips that we can insert into these cabinets and just try and move this inventory?

• 1:26:39Ben Gilbert?

  Right. So Radar Scope is this game that has, I think, one joystick and maybe two buttons. And like, can somebody come up with a game that leverages that and like, most of the same chips that are on the motherboard and leverage basically the assets we've got to create a new game out of this thing?

• 1:26:58David Rosenthal?

  Yep. And things are so bad. Yoko, at this point, is so pissed. She takes the kids and basically moves back to Japan. She's like, I can't believe this has happened. Like, we're out of here.

• 1:27:08Ben Gilbert?

  This is a pretty constrained problem, too, because you basically are saying, hey, create a different shooting game. Because when you only have the joystick and a couple buttons, basically every game at the time is, okay, use that to sort of move the gun to where you're gonna shoot it and then press shoot, and then maybe you have a different button. And so you're giving a pretty prescriptive order, and you're giving a pretty narrow set of things you could turn this into.

• 1:27:33David Rosenthal?

  Yep.

• 1:27:34Ben Gilbert?

  And less.

• 1:27:35David Rosenthal?

  So Yamayuki is so pissed. He can't take anybody off the console project. Those are his best engineers who could maybe pull some rabbit out of the hat here. He goes to Gunpei and he's like, "My dumbass son-in-law over in America,

• 1:27:52David Rosenthal?

  I gotta give him something. Can you give me like a janitor or somebody to like make a game here?" And Gunpei's like, "I literally can't take any engineers." And at the time, only engineers made games. Like, there was no game designer role. It was just the engineers who made the games. "I can't give you engineers. We do have this young kid who I brought onto the team, who is our design guy. He's here to help with the hardware design. He'd worked on the color TV game designs of the hardware and some of the user interface. He's pretty talented. He's not an engineer, but he's been wanting to make a game. I can give you that guy." Yamaguchi's like, "Fine, whatever."

• 1:28:31Ben Gilbert?

  And importantly, this isn't the B-team. This is the unknown.

• 1:28:35David Rosenthal?

  Right. This is literally like the janitor.

• 1:28:37Ben Gilbert?

  Right.

• 1:28:38David Rosenthal?

  And that guy's name is Shigeru Miyamoto. And this is how he comes to make his first video game.

• 1:28:46Ben Gilbert?

  Yes. And if you don't know that name, which I suspect 90% of you don't...

• 1:28:51David Rosenthal?

  Oh, I suspect 90% of people do know that name.

• 1:28:53Ben Gilbert?

  That's the thing. I'm really curious if people are like, "This is Miyamoto?" Or if people are like, "What the hell are you talking about?" And I think like, for those of you who know your Nintendo history, David just said, "And this is how God is discovered." But for those of you who don't, this is how God is discovered.

• 1:29:09David Rosenthal?

  The tablets come down from the mount. Moses brings them down. Miyamoto, Moses. Well, the game that young Shigeru Miyamoto makes to replace the radar scope software on these cabinets is called Donkey Kong. And Donkey Kong would itself go on to earn hundreds of millions of dollars immediately. In North America alone, it totally saves Nintendo of America's skin, earns $180 million the first year, another $100 million the second year in arcades. It becomes such an incredible franchise and IP, which we'll get into in a second, that just this game, the original Donkey Kong, has grossed over $5 billion alone

• 1:29:53David Rosenthal?

  in the decades since on all the platforms it's been released.

• 1:29:57Ben Gilbert?

  David, the year that it was released in 1982, it made more money than any film release that year, except for ET.

• 1:30:05David Rosenthal?

  Even more importantly, though, I'm so curious what percentage of our audience already knows this and what percentage doesn't. The playable character that the game Donkey Kong is actually named after the villain. The playable character in this game.

• 1:30:19Ben Gilbert?

  Is this very small, big headed, wearing a hat, sort of innocent, nameless carpenter?

• 1:30:32David Rosenthal?

  Yes.

• 1:30:33Ben Gilbert?

  Listeners, you might have thought that I was going for Italian plumber named Mario, but here we have proto Mario. We have Jumpman. Jumpman the carpenter.

• 1:30:45David Rosenthal?

  So what's going on here? Like I said, up until this point, everywhere in America, in Japan, the only people who made games were engineers. And Miyamoto has this incredible quote about this. He says, until Donkey Kong, programmers and engineers were responsible for game design. These were the days when engineers were even drawing the pictures and composing the music themselves. They were pretty terrible, weren't they?

• 1:31:12David Rosenthal?

  And specifically, like we've been talking about all episode, there was no story. The whole point of making the game was to make it technically competent and something competitive that would have enjoyable gameplay for mostly to suck up quarters in arcades.

• 1:31:27Ben Gilbert?

  It's also a frickin' miracle that they work at all. You think about the very early technology involved to like layer on more hard things on top of make this thing work, like make it, make people enter a flow state when they're playing it and make it repeatable over and over again and add story. Like, no, no, no, no, no. Arrange the chips in a way that it works and doesn't break quickly.

• 1:31:51David Rosenthal?

  Right. Miyamoto, on the other hand, he's not an engineer. He's a designer and he thinks games can be an art form. So when Yamouchi gives him the chance to make a game, he's like, finally, I can bring my genius to bear. He's not a self conceited man. I'm sure he didn't think of it that way. But he has a very different vision for what a game can be. Here's what David Schaff, who writes Game Over, which is a great book, writes about the conversation that Miyamoto and Yamouchi have when he gets assigned to make the game. Miyamoto boldly told the Nintendo chairman that he would enjoy creating a game. However, he said the shoot 'em up and tennis like games that were in the arcades at the time were unimaginative, simply uninteresting to many people.

• 1:32:33David Rosenthal?

  He had always wondered why video games were not treated more like books or movies. Why couldn't they draw on the great stories? Some of his favorite legends, fairy tales and fiction, King Kong, Jason and the Argonauts, even Macbeth. And this is exactly what Miyamoto does. He makes the first narrative driven video game.

• 1:32:54Ben Gilbert?

  Now, it's a super simple narrative and a very thin character. I mean, this notion of Jumpman running around at the bottom, trying to save this nameless princess from an ape that's throwing barrels, like it's not a lot of story.

• 1:33:09David Rosenthal?

  It's his girlfriend.

• 1:33:10Ben Gilbert?

  Oh, really?

• 1:33:11David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:12Ben Gilbert?

  Originally, it was not a princess?

• 1:33:13David Rosenthal?

  Well, so here's the story that Miyamoto comes up with for the video game. A regular everyman, Jumpman, has a pet gorilla who he keeps in his house. He's not very nice to this pet gorilla. He doesn't treat him very well. So one day, the gorilla escapes and kidnaps our protagonist's girlfriend as revenge for not being treated well. Now, it's important, the gorilla does not want to hurt the girlfriend.

• 1:33:38Ben Gilbert?

  That's right. Her name is just like Lady, right?

• 1:33:40David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:41Ben Gilbert?

  Like, they don't even name her.

• 1:33:42David Rosenthal?

  She was Pauline in the American version.

• 1:33:45Ben Gilbert?

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:33:46David Rosenthal?

  The gorilla, this is important, does not want to hurt the girlfriend. He actually likes her quite a bit. He just wants to stick it to the protagonist. So he runs with the girlfriend into a skyscraper construction site, climbs up to the top of this half constructed skyscraper and starts throwing barrels and construction equipment down at the protagonist as he tries to chase him up. And your goal as the player is to reach the top of the construction site, defeat the gorilla, and save the girlfriend, which is incredibly simplistic today, but nothing like this had ever existed before.

• 1:34:25Ben Gilbert?

  And so like wonderfully innocent and kind of convoluted too. Like, everything about that, you're like, what? That worked? That was the best story you could come up with?

• 1:34:34David Rosenthal?

  Yep. But despite its kind of wackiness and simplicity, it's a classic three act story.

• 1:34:41Ben Gilbert?

  Totally.

• 1:34:41David Rosenthal?

  There's a beginning, dramatic tension is introduced, there's a middle and a struggle, and there's an end and a victory and a resolution.

• 1:34:48Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. It's also worth saying Miyamoto came up with all this within the constraints of what Radar Scope's hardware was.

• 1:34:56David Rosenthal?

  Right.

• 1:34:57Ben Gilbert?

  So he managed to figure out a way to retrofit this hardware to create a non-shooting game and come up with a completely new game mechanic of climbing these ladders and avoiding the barrels using the same controls originally intended for Radar Scope.

• 1:35:10David Rosenthal?

  So while Miyamoto, like you said, not even the B-team or the C-team, just the unknown team is working on this game back in Japan.

• 1:35:18Ben Gilbert?

  Team Wildcard.

• 1:35:19David Rosenthal?

  Team Wildcard. Arakawa is totally freaking out back in New York. His wife has gone back to Japan, taken their kids. He's like, all right, I don't know if this is going to pan out here, but I know one thing. If we're going to save both the business for Nintendo in America and my marriage, we gotta leave New York. We gotta go to the West Coast of America because the shipping times, that's what the fatal mistake that we made with Radar Scope is we placed this huge order with a four-month lag time. We couldn't get any feedback. We couldn't get any test machines into the market.

• 1:35:52Ben Gilbert?

  I assume they had to go through the Panama Canal.

• 1:35:54David Rosenthal?

  I assume so, right? You can't just put all this stuff on an airplane and send it there. So he says, we gotta leave New York for business reasons. We loved being in Vancouver. We don't like New York. We can't move to Vancouver because we gotta be in the United States for what we're trying to do here, but we can move to Seattle.

• 1:36:15Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. Nice and close to Japan, easy shipping times.

• 1:36:19David Rosenthal?

  Easy drive to Vancouver. Yoko can hang out with all our old friends back there. This will be great.

• 1:36:26Ben Gilbert?

  And Microsoft was seven, eight years old at this point. And so, you know, there's starting to be some tech talent. There's the former Boeing engineers.

• 1:36:33David Rosenthal?

  Absolutely. And it's even more perfect. Our distribution guys who we hired and brought in-house, they're from Seattle. It's perfect. We need to move there. So while all this is going on back in Japan, they move the company to Seattle. They lease a warehouse space in Taquilla. For folks who don't know Seattle real estate, Taquilla is just south of the city, kind of by the airport. It's very like industrial.

• 1:36:57Ben Gilbert?

  It's a great place for your video game warehouse.

• 1:36:58David Rosenthal?

  Great place for your video game warehouse. Exactly. They ship the cabinets across the country by railroad from New Jersey to Taquilla. They're all hanging out there. Yoko and the kids come back. They're like, okay, great. And then the ROMs show up with the replacement game for radar scope with Donkey Kong. They plug them in, they all huddle around, they start playing and they're like WTF? What is this? We're screwed.

• 1:37:31Ben Gilbert?

  It's super different. They weren't really told what to expect. They basically get these conversion kits, you know, that show up via freight over the ocean. And it's got instructions of here's all the ways to replace all the components with these other components. Here's the way to load the new music on. In fact, there were rumors that this was going to be some like really great recognizable IP to help with sales, that Nintendo actually had some pre-existing relationship with the owners of the Popeye IP.

• 1:38:00David Rosenthal?

  Yes, they were working on a Popeye license with King Features.

• 1:38:03Ben Gilbert?

  Yes, this wasn't going to be like Jumpman and Lady and Donkey Kong.

• 1:38:09David Rosenthal?

  Is a nonsensical name for a gorilla.

• 1:38:11Ben Gilbert?

  Right. This was going to be Popeye and that was going to be Olive Oil instead of Lady. And that was going to be Brutus, the kidnapping character. That would sell well to an American audience. And this thing arrives with these brand new characters that no one's ever heard of. And they're like, crap.

• 1:38:27David Rosenthal?

  We are totally screwed. So Stone and Judy threatened to quit. They're like, well, this is not going to go anywhere. But they've got this kid, they've got hired a couple of kids in Seattle to work in the warehouse, you know, move stuff around, get it chipped out. And there's this one kid named Howard Phillips working there, who's just a total arcade nut. Loves video games. He plays it in the warehouse and he's like, guys, this is the greatest game I've ever played. This is a work of genius.

• 1:38:58Ben Gilbert?

  And the game mechanics are a work of genius, even though at first blush, you're like, this is not the type of thing that is selling well. Once you start playing it, you're like, oh, everything about it is thoughtful. It doesn't get boring right away. The music is continuous and recognizable without getting repetitive. There's random variables, so you can't just beat it the exact same way every single time. If you memorize all the right things to press, it actually has a lot of art to it, exactly what Miyamoto set out to do.

• 1:39:28David Rosenthal?

  Yep. And not only does it have that narrative and art, it's exactly what you're describing. This thing is really fun. If you pick up and play it, you can intuit really quickly how it works, how to play it, and you can just start having fun.

• 1:39:41Ben Gilbert?

  There's a maxim in the video game industry that a great game is easy to play, but hard to master. And that is exactly what this is.

• 1:39:49David Rosenthal?

  Yep. So Phillips in the warehouse is like really pleading. He's like, guys, like, this is really good. And they're like, okay, well, let's take it to a couple of bars around Seattle and just set it up and see what happens. And just like Pong back in the day, this thing becomes a quarter magnet. Phillips's intuition was right. None of the senior guys, none of the older guys, Arakawa, Stone and Judy, they didn't get it, but the kids did. And on the back of that, Phillips ends up becoming Arakawa's kind of most trusted advisor about games. And he becomes Nintendo's game master. He becomes a hero in Nintendo Power, all of this, like a national celebrity. It's incredible. The Nintendo of America

• 1:40:31David Rosenthal?

  management, though, does decide one thing. They're like, we get, okay, that there's this narrative revolution here with this game. I don't think it's going to work here if we call the protagonist Jumpman. We need to give him a little more of an identity than that. And so they're casting a vote, trying to decide what to name this character.

• 1:40:51Ben Gilbert?

  And by the way, I should say, I was shocked that Donkey Kong predated Mario. His name is not on the cover art in the very first game he appears in. Of course, he doesn't have a name, but yeah.

• 1:41:01David Rosenthal?

  So the legend goes that as they're debating this, the landlord of their warehouse in Tequila either shows up or sends a letter. It's unclear.

• 1:41:09Ben Gilbert?

  Shows up because they were way behind on rent because this fricking company didn't make any money.

• 1:41:14David Rosenthal?

  Demands the rent because they're late.

• 1:41:16Ben Gilbert?

  And the way I know he shows up is because he starts jumping around and ranting and raving and waving his arms in the air. And he's like, super animated. And they can see him there. And he's got this big bushy mustache.

• 1:41:28David Rosenthal?

  He's this Italian guy named Mario Segale. And this is how Super Mario gets his name.

• 1:41:36Ben Gilbert?

  Amazing.

• 1:41:37David Rosenthal?

  Totally amazing. They named the girlfriend Pauline, I think it was the either wife or girlfriend or of one of the guys working at the company at Nintendo of America at the time.

• 1:41:46Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, so they named her Pauline because the warehouse manager, who was taking a lot of the heat from Mario Segal and directing it away from the Nintendo guys and sort of like taking the hits for them. His wife was named Polly, so they named the character Pauline after her as a thank you to him.

• 1:42:04David Rosenthal?

  Nice. Nintendo has a history of doing this with their characters. Well, one more thank you naming of a character is going to come up in just a second here. So the game sells like wildfire. Like we said, all the 2,000, you know, former radar scope machines fly out of the warehouse. They order more, like they end up selling thousands and thousands of this.

• 1:42:23Ben Gilbert?

  It expands the TAM of who plays video games, too. That's the other thing is like, it's not just for boys anymore.

• 1:42:29David Rosenthal?

  It's not just teenage boys anymore or people in bars. Irony of ironies, TITO, the Japanese company that made Space Invaders, they call up Yamouche and they're like, hey, we're like the really good Japanese arcade game manufacturer. Now you've made this hit arcade game. Can we buy the rights to it from you to distribute it for Nintendo around the world? We'll pay you a ton of money for it. Yamouche is kind of inclined to sell because remember, he doesn't really care about the arcade business. He really just wants to set up Nintendo of America to get the distribution arm for the console that's coming. But he lets Arakawa make the final call. Arakawa says, nope, we're going to keep it. We're going to distribute it in-house at Nintendo of America.

• 1:43:11David Rosenthal?

  Of course, that ends up being totally the right decision and kind of re-earns Yamouche's trust from him.

• 1:43:16Ben Gilbert?

  It's like a multi-billion dollar correct decision.

• 1:43:19David Rosenthal?

  Multi-billion dollar correct decision. The other hilarious thing that happens is MCA Universal and the legendary Sid Scheinberg, who we talked about.

• 1:43:31Ben Gilbert?

  With Michael Ovitz.

• 1:43:32David Rosenthal?

  With Michael Ovitz over at MC Universal. Of course, sees what's going on with Donkey Kong and he's like. I'm gonna make some money on this.

• 1:43:40Ben Gilbert?

  He's like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Big gorilla thing all the way at the top of a building named Kong.

• 1:43:45David Rosenthal?

  It sounds like King Kong, which I think I own the rights to.

• 1:43:48Ben Gilbert?

  This is my circus and this is my monkey.

• 1:43:51David Rosenthal?

  I think we talked about this with Michael, but this is where it comes out in the court case. Sid would refer to the legal arm of MCA Universal and their legal suit activities as a profit center for the company.

• 1:44:02Ben Gilbert?

  God.

• 1:44:03David Rosenthal?

  He files suit against Nintendo of America for infringing on his King Kong trademark. Nintendo, led by Seattle lawyer Howard Lincoln, who would go on to succeed Arkawa as the president of Nintendo of America.

• 1:44:19Ben Gilbert?

  And I think Howard Lincoln was the personal lawyer first of the two guys who ran the import distribution business.

• 1:44:26David Rosenthal?

  That's right. So Lincoln sets Nintendo of America up with a great antitrust lawyer to fight off MCA. Which is a crazy decision. Like, they should have just settled with MCA.

• 1:44:39Ben Gilbert?

  Right? Tiny companies that are not doing well, getting sued by very dominant global entities like MCA Universal. You roll over.

• 1:44:47David Rosenthal?

  Yep. Lincoln sets up Nintendo with a great antitrust lawyer, John Kirby. And he and Lincoln together team up and they fight off Sid Scheinberg and MCA Universal. And they end up winning in court the case. And it hinges on they discover that Universal doesn't actually have the trademark for King Kong.

• 1:45:12Ben Gilbert?

  Because it was public domain.

• 1:45:13David Rosenthal?

  Exactly. And they knew it too. Scheinberg knew it.

• 1:45:17Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, that's the thing. And the judge slaps him across the face. He's like, you guys knew you were in the wrong here. You've been suing this company and all their partners just to try to be extractive, even though you know you don't have a case. I can't believe you followed up with this.

• 1:45:33David Rosenthal?

  This is where the profit center language comes out.

• 1:45:36Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. They're wrong on a bunch of vectors too. They're like, wait, wait, wait. One's a gorilla, one's an ape. And then the other argument that John Kirby finds, because John Kirby flies to Japan and starts interviewing a bunch of people at Nintendo to try and like mount the argument of like, they didn't know, of course they didn't reference King Kong IP. And he's in Japan and he's looking around and he's like, wait, in Japan, they use Kong to describe big monkeys generally. That's like a word that's commonly used. And so he uses that too. He's like, this thing was invented very quickly by this small team in Japan using common parlance. And so the judge just serves MCA Universal. He's like, you guys are dicks and you knew it and you were wrong and you owe all their legal fees.

• 1:46:16David Rosenthal?

  Ah, amazing, which is not normally what happens when MCA Universal goes to court.

• 1:46:22Ben Gilbert?

  No. And so as a thank you, Nintendo goes to John Kirby a few years later and says, we've got this great game in development and we're going to name the protagonist after you. And that is how Kirby got his name.

• 1:46:35David Rosenthal?

  Ah, great. Smash character.

• 1:46:37Ben Gilbert?

  Yes. Oh yeah, a lot of jumps. Okay, so we're at this point in time where Donkey Kong sold like gangbusters. They know they've got a hit on their hands. There's potential for these characters to really embrace their own storylines and there's strong incentive by Nintendo, the parent company in Japan, to really flesh this all out because they've got the Famicom nearing release. And so they're trying to figure out, is this thing that Miyamoto came up with on a lark, can he keep doing it? Should we turn the keys over to him creatively and say, hey, see if there's a there there

• 1:47:19Ben Gilbert?

  for this to be like the centerpiece of our launch of our console?

• 1:47:23David Rosenthal?

  Which they do. So Miyamoto makes a couple more games. He makes the sequel, Donkey Kong Jr. That also does really well. He makes an actual Popeye game. They finally get the license. Kind of in the same vein, that's a footnote in history. And then in 1983, he makes the first dedicated Mario game, Mario Brothers, as an arcade game.

• 1:47:46Ben Gilbert?

  Super Mario Brothers, right?

• 1:47:47David Rosenthal?

  Well, no, they're different games. Mario Brothers was an arcade game that Miyamoto made, and that's what introduced Luigi. And you had two plumbers. This is what canonically made them plumbers. The setting was underground and they had green pipes. And that's how they became plumbers.

• 1:48:03Ben Gilbert?

  Side note, when they came out this game, the Mario Brothers, people were like, oh, wait, the Mario Brothers. So Mario is the last name and Nintendo confirmed it. And so they were like, wait, so that guy's name is Luigi Mario? And that guy's name is Mario Mario? And Nintendo was like, correct. And I think they've maybe changed their stance on that over time, but.

• 1:48:21David Rosenthal?

  Amazing. What a Nintendo of Japan thing to do. I love it.

• 1:48:25Ben Gilbert?

  Exactly.

• 1:48:28David Rosenthal?

  But yes, it's clear that Miyamoto's got the golden touch here.

• 1:48:32Ben Gilbert?

  Yes.

• 1:48:32David Rosenthal?

  And has created this whole new discipline of game design, where the same principles as engineering apply. And Yamouchi completely understands this, just like he understood with Kumpa Yokoi, that there are these certain engineers out there who are so talented and so creative that they can do things and enable things with technology that nobody else can do. The same dynamics apply to game designers, that there are very few Shigeru Miyamoto's out there. And the value of what they make is worth many, many multiples of what every other game designer out there makes.

• 1:49:09Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 1:49:10David Rosenthal?

  So after Miyamoto proves that he wasn't just a flash in the pan, Yamouchi creates a fourth R and D division within Nintendo, puts Miyamoto in charge. And the sole purpose of this new R and D four unit, which would later become the legendary Entertainment Analysis and Development Group within Nintendo. The sole goal is to make games and to make the very best games in the world.

• 1:49:38Ben Gilbert?

  And their manifesto really ends up becoming fun first. And that sounds obvious, but in a way, they're sort of zigging where everyone else is zagging, where a lot of other game designers at this point in history are starting from a place of, we need to make a game that's in this category, or other people have made this game and it is successful, or games that are great today involve this set of things that everybody thinks you need for a game. And what the team that Miyamoto is leading is saying, we are on a quest to be inspired and find fun, and then we will build exactly the right window dressing around that

• 1:50:23Ben Gilbert?

  fun, that real kernel, that core mechanic that we love, and no more. We don't need to do any of the other stuff on top of that. If it's fun, and if it continues to be fun and it's super replayable, then our mission is accomplished. And it is a very, very, very different approach to how other people were designing games.

• 1:50:41David Rosenthal?

  Yes, exactly. Yamamoto has this great quote about Miyamoto and the Nintendo philosophy of what makes for a great game designer. He says, "An ordinary man cannot develop good games, no matter how hard he tries. A handful of people in this world can develop games that everybody wants. Those are the people we want at Nintendo." It's just so wild that Yamamoto, he's never played a game in his life.

• 1:51:06Ben Gilbert?

  And that is actually true. We haven't really harped on this yet, but like, this guy led Nintendo through its heyday, invented the modern Nintendo, found the talent to design and market all these games, and never played any of them.

• 1:51:20David Rosenthal?

  Yes, but he totally intuitively grasped all these principles that would just come to define not just the video game industry, but all technology industries.

• 1:51:30Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:31David Rosenthal?

  Amazing.

• 1:51:32Ben Gilbert?

  And that's right. That quote is less about fun and what defines fun and their philosophy on building, and more about like, most people don't have what it takes and Miyamoto has what it takes, and we've got Miyamoto, so good luck.

• 1:51:45David Rosenthal?

  Well, it's true. I mean, I think fun and that brand of fun is the Miyamoto and Nintendo style of game design. There are other brands of game design. I mean, folks like over at Square and Enix in Japan with the Dragon Quest series and the Final Fantasy series. Hirano Sataguchi, who was the father of the Final Fantasy series, would probably have a very different take on that, but he's equally a genius. Like, there are these few people who are just the very best in the world at what they do and nobody else can match them. Yep. So, we're now in 1983 and all the pieces are coming together. Nintendo's got the games.

• 1:52:29David Rosenthal?

  They've got the IP. They've got the creative genius in Miyamoto running R&D4. They've got the distribution network that they've always had in Japan, and now they've got it set up in North America as well. And the technology is just about ready. So, the R&D2 team has accomplished something nobody else can or would for years in the industry. Yep. They've created a home video game console that is not just a year, many years ahead of the competition and will sell for cheaper and profitably. There's so many of these unbelievable

• 1:53:12David Rosenthal?

  moments in the Nintendo story. The way they do it, it takes them years to come up with, is they realize that the brute force way of accomplishing the year-plus-ahead-of-the-competition directive that Yamayuchi gave them would be to get the fanciest, fastest, most Moore's Law-enabled, ahead-of-the-curve processor out there. But that would kill the bill of materials. That would make it way too expensive. Yep. So, they come up with this incredible innovation. They realize, okay, we're constrained on cost. We can only use cheap, off-the-shelf, you know, at this point dated technology for the CPU of this machine. And up until now, the CPU was everything. The CPU was

• 1:53:56David Rosenthal?

  the brain of the computer. You know, we're in the 80s, even through to the 90s. Remember, Intel's marketing and like the PC industry and the CPU was so important. What the Nintendo team realizes, because even though this is a programmable console, we're doing specialized applications for gaming. This doesn't have to be a machine that can also do your spreadsheets. We can pair a cheap CPU with a secondary processing unit within the machine that they dub the PPU, the Picture Processing Unit. And I think, maybe I'm wrong, and this is why nobody talks about this, or maybe like

• 1:54:39David Rosenthal?

  we've stumbled onto something like incredible in history that just everybody overlooked. I think this might be the first example of a dedicated GPU in a piece of hardware. Oh, interesting. I wonder if that's right. A programmable GPU. So let's unpack this a little bit. The Atari 2600 had a CPU that did most of the work, and then it also did have another chip that interfaced with the television. And Atari called this the TIA, the Television Interface Adapter. But there was no memory on this TIA chip. It was literally just there to like draw the graphics that the CPU was outputting to put on the television screen.

• 1:55:22David Rosenthal?

  The PPU that Nintendo designs and develops is its own programmable chip that sits next to the CPU within the NES, and it has eight bytes of memory, and it's dedicated to processing the graphics that get output on the television. So that has specialized circuitry both for doing the backgrounds of the games and for processing the sprites, so which are the like characters, the movable items on the screen. Wow. And I think this was the first example of a machine and an architecture in history where like The workload was split up like this because it was a decade later when Nvidia came around and invented the GPU.

• 1:56:06Ben Gilbert?

  Which is farcical.

• 1:56:08David Rosenthal?

  Of course, they didn't. But now it would be until that time when people would think about using this architecture in computers, in PCs.

• 1:56:18Ben Gilbert?

  Right.

• 1:56:18David Rosenthal?

  But in this subset of the computing market, it was Nintendo.

• 1:56:22Ben Gilbert?

  I think you're right. I mean, I can't think of a counter example off the top of my head, or where a counter example would even exist.

• 1:56:26David Rosenthal?

  Right. That's what I thought about, too. I'm like, I can't think of anything else. And again, like, it is technically true that the Atari and other consoles had chips that handled the graphics output from the CPU, but they weren't programmable. They didn't have onboard memory, and they weren't doing any of the processing of the graphics. The PPU at the NES is actually doing a lot of work, and it all came about as this necessitated by this constraint that Yamayuchi put on the team of like, this has got to sell for less than 100 bucks.

• 1:56:57Ben Gilbert?

  Super clever. I mean, the famous thing that Nintendo also went on to do, and I'm very curious if you know sort of how this came to be, is that their games are optimized for fun, not to show off the hardware. And so they're always able to do what translates very poorly to the US as lateral thinking of seasoned technology, that it's about inventiveness.

• 1:57:23David Rosenthal?

  I think the literal translation is withered technology.

• 1:57:25Ben Gilbert?

  Withered technology. You know, it's not about using the state of the art chips. It's not about using the most expensive hardware. It's about how clever and inventive and fun can you be with it? It sounds like the first example of cost savings was around this PPU.

• 1:57:39David Rosenthal?

  Well, it actually was the Game and Watch. Gunpei Yoko's work on the Game and Watch, which he's the author of this philosophy within Nintendo.

• 1:57:47Ben Gilbert?

  Oh.

• 1:57:47David Rosenthal?

  And that's what led him to that. He's like, oh, we'll take this calculator technology and apply it to games, and we can use this kind of lateral technology to make something fun while keeping the cost down. But it's the same thought here. I mean, the CPU that they end up using in the NES is a slightly customized, but basically off the shelf MOS Technology 6502, which by this point in time is like a very standard off the shelf CPU used in thousands of applications around the world.

• 1:58:17Ben Gilbert?

  It's like how the Switch processor is like a circa 2014 Android phone chip.

• 1:58:23David Rosenthal?

  And a crappy one at that.

• 1:58:25Ben Gilbert?

  Huh. Okay. So they already were fully embracing the idea that we actually don't need the most expensive hardware to create the most fun experiences.

• 1:58:33David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. And in this case, it was really interesting in that the NES had graphical capability, literally years beyond any of its competitors. But it did it with cheaper technology. And that was the amazing innovation. And that enabled a bunch of things. Most importantly, at the outset for the FAMCOM and NES, it meant that this new console would be able to have totally 100% accurate ports of arcade games. When arcade games would come to other home consoles like the Atari 2600, they had to be dumbed down a little bit because the hardware like couldn't handle it.

• 1:59:18David Rosenthal?

  When you're making an arcade cabinet, you can have dedicated customized chips and systems and circuit boards for that game, which will allow you to do better graphics, more fancier stuff.

• 1:59:29Ben Gilbert?

  Right.

• 1:59:29David Rosenthal?

  That if you're then trying to bring it to something like the 2600, you're going to have to make a bunch of compromises. The NES was able to have the best ports of Donkey Kong, Mario Brothers, you know, the Nintendo titles, but then the third party titles too.

• 1:59:45Ben Gilbert?

  Right. So interesting. I mean, it makes a lot of sense with the way that cartridges work too, because unlike CDs, where, you know, in the modern era, you're reading a game off of some media, loading it into memory and then executing it on the hardware of the actual platform of the console. In the cartridge era, the circuitry was in the console. And so everything kind of like loads instantly because you are literally playing the game on the hardware within the cartridge. And it's this perfect marriage of the circuitry in the cartridge and the circuitry in the console itself that creates exactly enough resources to play that game and nothing more.

• 2:00:24David Rosenthal?

  Yep.

• 2:00:26David Rosenthal?

  Wild innovation, technology-wise, that comes out of Nintendo in this time is just incredible. They do stuff like, um, later in the Famicom and NES's lifecycle, I think with Super Mario 3, the NES is kind of like old in the tooth, the Genesis is out at this point and like, the graphics aren't industry-leading like they used to be. They start putting computing chips on the cartridges to help the console.

• 2:00:50Ben Gilbert?

  Oh.

• 2:00:50David Rosenthal?

  Because it like marries together in the same system when the cartridge is in the console. They do some similar stuff with Zelda.

• 2:00:56Ben Gilbert?

  Okay, so take us to 1983, take us to launching the Famicom in Japan.

• 2:01:00David Rosenthal?

  So on July 15th, 1983, after years of work, Nintendo finally launches the Famicom, the family computer, Famicom for short, in Japan.

• 2:01:11Ben Gilbert?

  Because they had broader ambitions than gaming.

• 2:01:13David Rosenthal?

  Right. They had zany stuff. They thought like, oh, this is so powerful, what we can do with these two chips. We're gonna give it a keyboard, we're gonna like be a Trojan horse into the home, like all the stuff that Sony would do, sort of stupidly later. Nintendo originally wanted to do that. They ended up cutting all of it to save costs. They still don't get the machine under a hundred dollars in Japan. It retails for 14,800 yen, which is like 110, 120 bucks at the time, but still way below any of the competitors on the market and way, way, way better. The first shipments in Japan immediately sell out. They sell 500,000 units when they launch. Then there's actually, they have to do a recall. There's a fault in the motherboard.

• 2:01:56David Rosenthal?

  Cause it's such a like complex system and they hadn't worked out all the kinks when they launched it. It's kind of like the famous Tylenol case. They do a nationwide recall. They recall every Famicom system in Japan.

• 2:02:06Ben Gilbert?

  And they don't just replace the one broken chip, they strip out the entire motherboard and replace every motherboard on every single unit to show people like we're really serious about quality.

• 2:02:18David Rosenthal?

  Yep. And so, starting from the summer of 1983 in Japan, right as the video game industry is dying in America, this rocket ship of Nintendo and the Famicom just takes off in Japan. They sell, over the next two years, every single unit they can make. They had placed a 3 million unit order with Ricoh, the Japanese semiconductor manufacturer.

• 2:02:41Ben Gilbert?

  Ricoh manufactured them? Oh my god.

• 2:02:44David Rosenthal?

  And Nintendo became by far their biggest customer.

• 2:02:47Ben Gilbert?

  Huh. I used to have a Ricoh camera.

• 2:02:49David Rosenthal?

  That's right. So they did a deal with RICO to manufacture the CPU and PPU tandem system together. And the only way they could get the price down far enough to hit the price point they wanted at retail was to place a 3 million unit order upfront, which was like crazy at the time.

• 2:03:07Ben Gilbert?

  Totally.

• 2:03:07David Rosenthal?

  It was 3 million units over two years. They couldn't make them fast enough. They sold out the whole thing. It was incredible.

• 2:03:13Ben Gilbert?

  God, Nintendo got so lucky that the Japanese market wasn't saturated the same way that the US market was. They launched into like the very best conditions in Japan they could of frankly, not a lot of competitive consoles at that moment.

• 2:03:26David Rosenthal?

  Yep. So over the next few years, the Famicom would go on to sell almost 20 million units in Japan. In Japan in the 80s, there were only 38 million households.

• 2:03:41David Rosenthal?

  So they get an almost 50% penetration into the Japanese market.

• 2:03:48Ben Gilbert?

  Whoa.

• 2:03:49David Rosenthal?

  Isn't that wild?

• 2:03:51Ben Gilbert?

  Wow, that is crazy.

• 2:03:53David Rosenthal?

  It just becomes this enormous juggernaut in Japan. But meanwhile, of course, the big Kahuna market is the US. There's 90 million households in the US at the time in the 80s. And not just 90 million households, there are plenty of other countries that have 90 million households. There are 90 million US households that mostly, 100% of them have a television, were used to playing arcade games, knew about the home video game market from everything that had just happened.

• 2:04:23Ben Gilbert?

  Has the highest GDP per capita in the world.

• 2:04:26David Rosenthal?

  And could afford to buy a console, especially a relatively cheap console like the NES, you know, not 100%, but 70%, 80% of the US market could afford this.

• 2:04:41Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. Wow, that's crazy.

• 2:04:43David Rosenthal?

  So by 1983, like, everything's all set up, ready to go in America. Yamayuchi's like, "All right, let's go."

• 2:04:52Ben Gilbert?

  And like, you gotta be wondering, like, should we pull the trigger? This is like a crazy moment to decide, like, yes, let's launch. Let's flash back two hours before the Nintendo story and remember the state that the United States was in. They just went from $3.2 billion, being the home gaming market size, to $100 million. And they're burying games in concrete, in landfills, and smashing them up and throwing away consoles. And this is 1983, so it's the exact same moment in Japan that somebody, I don't know exactly who and exactly what the story is, but somebody is deciding to pull the trigger and say,

• 2:05:31David Rosenthal?

  Yamayuchi.

• 2:05:32Ben Gilbert?

  "Take the Famicom and make an American version of it."

• 2:05:36David Rosenthal?

  Yes. So Arakawa's like, "I hear you. I don't think this is the right time."

• 2:05:44Ben Gilbert?

  So that's the crazy thing. This is the thing that I think I couldn't tell between reading stories from the US perspective, stories from the Japanese perspective. Do you have a sense of how that dynamic went?

• 2:05:56David Rosenthal?

  I read so many versions of this, so a lot of this is my speculation. I can't 100% say for sure that this is exactly what happened, but this is kind of how I imagine, based on everything I read. I think Yamayuchi wanted to do it. I think Arakawa did not. And I think Yamayuchi overruled Arakawa and said, "Fine, if you're not gonna do it, we're gonna partner with somebody who will." Even though,

• 2:06:24Ben Gilbert?

  Whoa.

• 2:06:24David Rosenthal?

  "You set up everything to be in-house with Nintendo, set up this whole Nintendo of America, this distribution arm. We went through all this. You proved yourself with Donkey Kong, even though I saved you, but I wanted to sell to Tito and you said that was wrong. I want to get this in the US so badly, I'm gonna go around you." Nintendo goes to Atari. Remember this, we talked about this with Nolan Bushnell and he was like, yeah, I wasn't involved. That was really dumb because he had already left Atari at this point and it was owned by Warner's. Yamauchi goes to Atari and says Nintendo America is not going to launch the Famicom. I want you to launch the Famicom now in the US.

• 2:07:05Ben Gilbert?

  Wow.

• 2:07:06David Rosenthal?

  And they basically have a deal done. They negotiated, this is going to be Atari, under Warner's knows that their hardware, the 2600 at this point is like dead. It can't compete with the NES. They also know the market is totally going sideways. So they're like, sure, you know, worst case scenario, we can just sit on a competitor and tie up Nintendo and not launch this. Best case scenario, this is the Atari Nintendo Entertainment System.

• 2:07:34Ben Gilbert?

  Wow. So what happened?

• 2:07:36David Rosenthal?

  They basically have a deal done. They are all set to sign it at the summer CES conference in June of 1983. So Yamauchi directs Arakawa and Howard Lincoln to go down to LA and meet with Atari and Warner Brothers, start the initial negotiations. They do that. It goes well and I'm sure Arakawa is like, I can't believe this is happening. Then the Atari folks fly out to Japan and meet with Yamauchi.

• 2:08:07Ben Gilbert?

  Whoa.

• 2:08:07David Rosenthal?

  They get a deal basically agreed to in principle where Atari is going to distribute the Famicom, not just in North America, but everywhere in the world except for Japan. And they're going to pay Nintendo a per unit royalty fee. Nintendo would still get to sell the game cartridges. So it actually wouldn't have been like a terrible deal because all the money and all the profits are in the game cartridges.

• 2:08:32Ben Gilbert?

  Right.

• 2:08:32David Rosenthal?

  But still, like, talk about history changing on a knife point. This would have been Atari's business.

• 2:08:37Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. And Nintendo wouldn't have had the direct relationship with certainly not customers, but not even retailers.

• 2:08:42David Rosenthal?

  Retailers. It wouldn't have built the brand. You know, all the IP, we're going to get into all the amazing stuff that really Nintendo of America drives.

• 2:08:48Ben Gilbert?

  Oh, it would have been an Atari branded Famicom.

• 2:08:51David Rosenthal?

  Yup.

• 2:08:52Ben Gilbert?

  Whoa.

• 2:08:53David Rosenthal?

  So they're all set to sign this at the June CES show in Chicago in 1983. So summer 1983.

• 2:09:02David Rosenthal?

  But by this point in time, the crash is already underway. And Atari and Warner's are keeping these negotiations going, just to keep Nintendo tied up. But they know that they can't actually follow through and like,

• 2:09:15Ben Gilbert?

  Oh.

• 2:09:16David Rosenthal?

  Deliver on this partnership because in the second quarter of 1983, Atari reports a $283 million loss as part of Warner's earnings in 2Q 1983. In the third quarter, so after CES, that goes up to a $536 million quarterly loss at the Atari division. A year before, I think, like we said at the top of the episode, Atari had been half of Warner Brothers' entire revenue and 60% of its operating income. And now it's reporting a $536 million quarterly loss. So like, the other shoe's about to drop. They have no power. They can't do anything at this point. It's just a charade.

• 2:09:56Ben Gilbert?

  So this probably would have happened.

• 2:09:58David Rosenthal?

  This definitely would have happened if the timing were different.

• 2:10:01Ben Gilbert?

  Wow.

• 2:10:03David Rosenthal?

  But, well, maybe it would have, maybe it wouldn't have, you know, I think, I don't know 100% for sure, but I think Arakawa was like, yo, the reason I don't want to launch now is like, now is not the time to launch this in America. I can see what's going to happen here. So maybe it wouldn't have, like, if things were different, maybe he and Nintendo of America would have let it from the beginning.

• 2:10:22Ben Gilbert?

  And in a sense, Arakawa was right. The fact that they didn't release what became the NES, the US version, which is a little bit of modified from the Japanese one for another two years.

• 2:10:34David Rosenthal?

  In one very key way, it's modified, which we'll get into in a sec.

• 2:10:37Ben Gilbert?

  Two years later is a much better time to launch this system.

• 2:10:39David Rosenthal?

  Much better. And in the intervening two years, all the revenue and profits that Nintendo of Japan, Nintendo Co., LTD, the parent company, was making, allowed the whole company to be in a much better position to weather the investment they were going to have to make to re-educate the American market when they do launch. And just to put some numbers on that, for the first couple of years of the Famicom in Japan, not only are they selling every piece of hardware that they can make, every console that they sell has a, what comes to be known in the industry as an attach rate, the number of games that are sold with it. Going up to like 11 or 12 games per console, not per year, but for the life of the console.

• 2:11:23David Rosenthal?

  And I couldn't actually find what the retail price of Famicom cartridges were in Japan at that time, but let's assume they were comparable to the US, which would be kind of 7,000 to 10,000 yen, kind of like half-ish of the price of the console. If you're selling 12 games at half the price of the console, you're making another 6X the console revenue at like 80% gross margins.

• 2:11:49Ben Gilbert?

  God, that's crazy.

• 2:11:50David Rosenthal?

  It's just a cash flow spigot.

• 2:11:52Ben Gilbert?

  And that attach rate is high even relative to like the big consoles today. Like I think PlayStation and Xbox, it's different with the subscription stuff today, but target like a seven or eight game attach rate. What did you say, 11 game attach rate?

• 2:12:06David Rosenthal?

  11 to 12, yep.

• 2:12:07Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, it's nuts.

• 2:12:09David Rosenthal?

  Totally nuts. Even more importantly though, building up to an eventual US launch, it's during those couple of years from 1983 to 1985 that Miyamoto and R&D4 start churning out an existing library of just amazing games. So Duck Hunt, Super Mario Brothers, which is the first, you know, Mario game like we know it today.

• 2:12:35Ben Gilbert?

  Absolute smash hit, side-scroller platformer, yes.

• 2:12:39David Rosenthal?

  You know what it is. The Legend of Zelda, which actually was the launch game for the Famicom disk system in Japan, which is, we won't get into it here, but The Legend of Zelda was the best thing to come out of it, let's put it that way. So Super Mario Brothers for a long time was the top-selling video game in history. Over the lifetime of that title, it sold over 60 million copies, obviously across multiple platforms, not just the NES.

• 2:13:06Ben Gilbert?

  Of just Super Mario Brothers 1?

• 2:13:08David Rosenthal?

  Super Mario Brothers 1.

• 2:13:10Ben Gilbert?

  Wow.

• 2:13:10David Rosenthal?

  60 million copies. Duck Hunt sells 28 million copies. Later, Super Mario Brothers 3 would sell 24 million copies.

• 2:13:21Ben Gilbert?

  Keep in mind, listeners, there are 90 million households in the US.

• 2:13:25David Rosenthal?

  Right. So these individual games, this is the point we were making earlier that Yamamuchi understood, they're making billions, billions of dollars per game. You know, that takes Miyamoto on a small team at this point in time, somewhere between six months and a year to make these games.

• 2:13:46Ben Gilbert?

  Well, there are some games that take four or five years.

• 2:13:48David Rosenthal?

  Right, right, right. But even in just those two years, from 1983 to 1985, Duck Hunt, Super Mario Brothers, Legend of Zelda, launched during those two years. Actually, Zelda might have been a little bit later, but like, that's billions and billions of dollars, like incredible. So when they're finally ready to launch in the US in 1985, they've got so much firepower to bring to bear here.

• 2:14:13Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. So they do a few things differently when they're developing the NES. They take away the word "computer," which is sort of an important nod to, you know, we wanted this thing to do all sorts of stuff, to have check stocks and weather. And I even think it did some of that in Japan by this point. I think they did have the ability to connect to your phone line in sort of like a pre-internet way and get some of these services. But they launched in the US and they're like, this is an entertainment system. Congratulations, you've just bought the very best way in the world to play video games. And for the US version, the NES also had removable controllers. They were hardwired in on the FAMCOM in Japan.

• 2:14:56Ben Gilbert?

  And in the US, an important difference, the cartridges had a lockout chip.

• 2:15:01David Rosenthal?

  Ah, yes. The critical difference. That brings up the next pillar of the unbelievable Nintendo business model that we need to talk about: third-party licensing.

• 2:15:15Ben Gilbert?

  And this is probably like a place to talk generally about the role of Nintendo of America versus the Japanese parent company. Because to this point, what we've basically talked about for Nintendo of America is they were a distributor. They were a regulatory arm. They had to pay payroll and they had to do that in US dollars for US employees. And also, they set up the distribution network and had some opinions on a go/no-go decision of whether to launch in the US. But like, they aren't doing a lot of product-specific work.

• 2:15:47David Rosenthal?

  Or business model or yeah, Yamouchi definitely thought of Arakawa and Nintendo of America, despite him being his son-in-law, or because he was his son-in-law, just thought of them as like my American distribution network.

• 2:16:02Ben Gilbert?

  Yes.

• 2:16:03David Rosenthal?

  But here's where things start to change. So Yamouchi did know and had learned from the Atari third-party licensing business model that we talked about with Activision and all that, that that was an incredible cash flow stream and point of power. You know, he knew that even he wasn't going to be able to get all of the elite game designers in the world to come work for Miyamoto and Nintendo. But he did know that he could get all of the elite game designers in the world to publish on the Famicom. So he sets up third-party licensing in Japan. The first two licensees are Namco, the Japanese arcade

• 2:16:44David Rosenthal?

  game company that made Pac-Man, and Hudson. The first games that those companies, they were established companies, especially Namco, like were big existing companies, video game companies in Japan, before publishing on the Famicom. It transforms their business when they publish their first titles as third-party licensees with Nintendo. Konami, which is another Japanese game developer that listeners might recognize, once they start publishing in Japan on the Famicom, their revenue goes from $10 million a year to $300 million a year.

• 2:17:17Ben Gilbert?

  Oh my god.

• 2:17:18David Rosenthal?

  This is how powerful what they've built is.

• 2:17:21Ben Gilbert?

  All right. So this is how consumers want to play video games. So if you make a video game, you should probably figure out a way to go to market on this.

• 2:17:28David Rosenthal?

  This is the power of a platform and a network effect in the video game console business. Yamouchi gets all this. The terms that he sets up for the initial licensees in Japan, he just copies the Atari business model. They pay Nintendo a 20% royalty on their revenues from the games. And that's it. I mean, great cash flow stream for Nintendo, wonderful, all that. But they could be doing so much more. And indeed, the next set of licensees in Japan, Nintendo ups the cut to 30% that they take and says, oh, by the way, only we can manufacture the cartridges. You got to buy the cartridges from us. You can't make them yourself too. And we're going to make a profit on that too. So like, good.

• 2:18:11Ben Gilbert?

  Which at this point is just contractual. It's not a technical limitation.

• 2:18:16David Rosenthal?

  Yes, exactly. And there's also no legal structure that they've set up in Japan that prevents anyone else from sort of unofficially making and publishing games for Nintendo. And so a gray market emerges of developers who say, we're going to make Famicom games, but not work with Nintendo and sell them ourselves. And famously, one specific company from Taiwan called Hacker International starts making both pornographic games and gambling games. Super ironic, given Nintendo's origins.

• 2:18:52Ben Gilbert?

  And Nintendo, meanwhile, has drifted like very Disney, very Apple and their family friendliness. And so this is so like antithetical.

• 2:18:59David Rosenthal?

  Strict censorship, like all of this stuff that we think of Nintendo today has, you know, they've been in the toy business for decades at this point.

• 2:19:06Ben Gilbert?

  By the way, this sounds hard to do. Like you have to figure out how to manufacture the like correct sized plastic and the correct motherboard with all the correct pin connectors. Like if you don't have a factory set up to make Famicom cartridges, creating that sounds really hard.

• 2:19:23David Rosenthal?

  But the economic incentive to do so is worth it. This market is so big. So companies like Hacker International are making tons of money selling their own cartridges directly and not paying a dime to Nintendo. And meanwhile, they've got this brand problem that's emerged and all this stuff. And like, if they're not careful, even though the Famicom is so advanced and so superior, you're not going to end up with the same thing as happened in America in 1983 with a video game crash, but you're going to have some of the same problems if you don't control the ecosystem of publishing around your platform. So Nintendo of America, when it comes time to launch what would become the NES in the US,

• 2:20:06David Rosenthal?

  they come up with maybe the most genius inversion of all time.

• 2:20:13David Rosenthal?

  One, they say we should engineer a lockout chip that you were referring to into the hardware and the software. It's actually unclear to me if that idea came from Japan or from America, but the Japanese engineers implemented it. And this is a specific chip in the console that needs to handshake with specific chips in the cartridges for the new systems in America that will lock out any not official Nintendo-approved cartridges from playing in the console.

• 2:20:42Ben Gilbert?

  I don't know if it's actually how it works, but it's effectively a Nintendo-signed cryptographic thing. So it's like unless you actually go through Nintendo to make sure you get the specific chip with the specific cryptography and put it in the cartridge, it's not going to run on them.

• 2:21:00David Rosenthal?

  Yep, totally. And actually, later versions of the Famicom in Japan would also include a lockout chip on them. So they try and retroactively also bring this to the Japanese market. But Nintendo of America is like, obviously, a lot of people in the ecosystem are going to hate this. What if we market it, though, to consumers as this is a good thing? We know that you consumers got burned by the glut of mediocre software in the last video game bubble. We Nintendo are on your side. We're going to make sure that doesn't happen

• 2:21:37David Rosenthal?

  here. This is our seal of quality, the Nintendo seal of quality that we are promising to you, our customers, that only the very best, highest-quality software and hardware peripherals are going to come out for your system. This is absolute genius.

• 2:21:57Ben Gilbert?

  And this is the exact thing that Apple steals from. This is the exact party line. This is the exact strategy. When they launched the App Store, to this day, this is the exact reason that they have to justify it. Oh, my gosh, for privacy, for security, this is for the benefit of our users. Side-loading is the worst thing ever. I watched Craig Federici give a talk on stage in Lisbon two years ago, talking about how side-loading or external apps Stores would be the worst possible thing. And Apple generates tens of billions of dollars a year from the 30% of everything that runs through their app store.

• 2:22:30David Rosenthal?

  And they stole it all from Nintendo of America.

• 2:22:33Ben Gilbert?

  It is to the number, the same thing that Nintendo was getting with that 30%.

• 2:22:38David Rosenthal?

  So, so, so good. And they don't, Nintendo of America doesn't stop there. They're so audacious with what they do, but they could get away with it because nobody cared in America. It was a dead industry.

• 2:22:49Ben Gilbert?

  And also they had a great device, like again, the iPhone parallel here. Steve Jobs always said, this is five years ahead of the competition. I think that ended up being around it, maybe a year or two, but like basically right. The Famicom was five years ahead of the competition in consoles. So they go and they have the very best device on the market that everyone wants. You aggregate all the users, you could do whatever the hell you want to your developers.

• 2:23:13David Rosenthal?

  Oh my gosh. And they just make money six ways from Sunday on this. So it continues, the legal innovations of Nintendo of America here. And really I think Howard Lincoln is behind a lot of this. They say, we're going to go further. Any third party that makes games for the NES in America. We're going to limit the number of games that you can make per year. We're only going to allow you to release a maximum of five games per year on the platform. They're just like flagrant here. They're just like, oh, the DOJ is never going to come for us.

• 2:23:47Ben Gilbert?

  Which they didn't, I don't think.

• 2:23:48David Rosenthal?

  No, they did in Europe. I think they got in trouble for this, but somehow they escaped in the US. There is truth to the promise that Nintendo is making to consumers. If you do this, it does mean that anybody who publishes for the NES can't just offload a ton of crap on the system. They have to pick their five best games and that's all they can do any year.

• 2:24:10Ben Gilbert?

  And Nintendo is going to just like, if they feel like someone's game is crap, there's not going to prove it.

• 2:24:15David Rosenthal?

  Yep.

• 2:24:15Ben Gilbert?

  No chips for you.

• 2:24:16David Rosenthal?

  Exactly. And then the third thing that they build into the Nintendo of America licensing program. Your games that you publish on the NES have to be exclusive to the NES for at least two years. Which doesn't matter right now because there's no viable competition, but will become.

• 2:24:36Ben Gilbert?

  The Sega would come out.

• 2:24:37David Rosenthal?

  Very important, very soon.

• 2:24:38Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. Dirty.

• 2:24:40David Rosenthal?

  Or clean. Nintendo would say clean.

• 2:24:42Ben Gilbert?

  Yes, they would.

• 2:24:43David Rosenthal?

  We are keeping our platform clean. So Nintendo of America and Nintendo Japan finally align that they're going to launch in North America for the 1985 holiday season. And they're going to launch in a test market to start the New York City metro market. Super important because this is the epicenter of the toy industry. So they managed to get relationships with both FAO Schwarz and Toys R Us. And Toys R Us would become huge. Of course, it's already national at this point, the biggest toy chain in America. It's based in New Jersey. So it's very strategic to launch in New York. They convinced the retailers to carry them.

• 2:25:25David Rosenthal?

  And this is where the next set of innovations come from Nintendo of America. Partially, I think this was necessity because the retailers, even though they know this is an incredible product, they're skeptical. Like, it's not obvious that this is going to work. The consumers are way, way, way down on home video games at this point, even still in 1985. Nintendo says, "We will come merchandise this within your stores for you. We'll make it so easy for you to do this test with us. You don't have to take your staff off of other things. If you can give us space in your stores." How very Louis Vuitton. Yeah, exactly. This is, I think, the first store within a store in America.

• 2:26:07David Rosenthal?

  Literally, they come in and they set up the Nintendo displays and they do everything. Eventually, this would evolve and become the World of Nintendo. That is the way that, you know, if you were a kid or parents in the 80s and 90s and you bought Nintendo products in a toy store, you bought them at the World of Nintendo store within the Toys R Us or, you know, the Target or the Babbages or whatever. And all of that, that experience was controlled by Nintendo of America.

• 2:26:42Ben Gilbert?

  Fascinating.

• 2:26:43David Rosenthal?

  And of course, they could put all sorts of other ancillary merchandise in there. Mario backpacks, T-shirts, you know, blah, blah, blah, what have you.

• 2:26:48Ben Gilbert?

  God knows, did they put Mario on backpacks and T-shirts?

• 2:26:51David Rosenthal?

  Oh, boy, did they ever. So they managed to sell 50,000 units during the Christmas season in New York, which is not a grand slam success by any means, but like that they even sold that much. That'd be about $5 million in total sales. Again, like, not a lot, but given that the whole industry had shrunk to $100 million in sales, that they could sell 5 million in one metro market in one holiday.

• 2:27:19Ben Gilbert?

  To take 5% of the US's market share, just in that one holiday season, that one metro, not bad.

• 2:27:25David Rosenthal?

  Not bad.

• 2:27:26Ben Gilbert?

  It's funny, when you said 50,000, I was like, so it flopped when it launched. But actually, when you think about it, relative to how terrible the market was.

• 2:27:32David Rosenthal?

  No, like, everybody was like, look, do we wish we sold more? Sure, but like, this is actually a success.

• 2:27:38Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:39David Rosenthal?

  So throughout 1986, they start rolling out more metros throughout the US. They take a kind of rolling thunder approach, which we're going to get to in a minute. Also becomes the next innovation from Nintendo of America.

• 2:27:50Ben Gilbert?

  Can you imagine this today if they rolled out the Switch like city by city?

• 2:27:54David Rosenthal?

  Right.

• 2:27:54Ben Gilbert?

  So antiquated.

• 2:27:56David Rosenthal?

  So antiquated, but so brilliant, which we'll get into in a sec. They sell a million units throughout all of 1986. So like, okay, we're now like in real business. 1987, it's officially available nationwide. They sell 3 million units in 1987 and 10 million game packs. So like, at this point, they're already basically coming close to parity with Japan, which is incredible, given that the whole industry was dead two years ago in America.

• 2:28:22Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 2:28:23David Rosenthal?

  But the strategy and how they roll out to retail is brilliant. Remember, it was oversupply that killed the market before, and you're trying to bring a market back from the dead. Like, what will kill a market is when you have supply and demand out of whack, where there's way more supply than demand. Even though there's just a trickle of demand for video games at this point in America, Nintendo of America leans into it. And they say to retailers, after that first New York City test launch, we only have a very small amount of product available. They ration the product.

• 2:28:58Ben Gilbert?

  I think they fill 50% of every order.

• 2:29:01David Rosenthal?

  And this is an unofficial, never written down anywhere for fear of the DOJ, but like a unofficial policy of Nintendo of America for years and years and years. Retailers only get half their orders.

• 2:29:13Ben Gilbert?

  Wow.

• 2:29:14David Rosenthal?

  And it works like a charm. All of a sudden, the NES and a video game console goes from being like on the markdown, collecting dust in a bin somewhere to the hot thing.

• 2:29:28Ben Gilbert?

  You better show up at 6 a.m. to get it on the shelf.

• 2:29:31David Rosenthal?

  You gotta stand in line. Like, it becomes this super hard to get. It's everything we talked about in the LVMH episode. This object of desire that is very difficult to get.

• 2:29:40Ben Gilbert?

  They also take a page out of Disney's book and they keep most of their game catalog out of production most of the time.

• 2:29:48David Rosenthal?

  Yes.

• 2:29:48Ben Gilbert?

  And so it's also hard to get a game unless it's new, or one of the few that they've brought back into production.

• 2:29:54David Rosenthal?

  Yep. So Yamayuchi actually brings a lot of these innovations from Nintendo of America back to Japan. So they alter the terms of the licensing agreements with third parties. They go even further in Japan in true Yamayuchi style. They can only make three games a year in Japan instead of five games in the US. They add the exclusivity clause. Like we said, they changed the hardware on future Famicom models to add a lockout chip.

• 2:30:21Ben Gilbert?

  They have so much control over every player in the ecosystem.

• 2:30:25David Rosenthal?

  It's so Disney-like. And then finally, in 1988, Nintendo of America still has their retail strategy, shall we say, but it blows through the roof. They sell 7 million NES units in 1988.

• 2:30:40David Rosenthal?

  Which is way more than Japan and 33 million game packs in America in 1988. So that's just in America, a billion dollars in console revenue and another one and a half billion dollars in software revenue.

• 2:30:53Ben Gilbert?

  A billion dollars in console revenue in 1988 is 10 times the entire market size for home video game consoles four years before.

• 2:31:03David Rosenthal?

  1989 and 1990, they sell about another 10 million units of the hardware each year, such that by the end of 1990, one-third of American households, 30 million American households have an NES. And in the annual Q ratings in America, which aren't as much of a thing anymore, but I had to be reminded of it. It's a measure of recognizability of celebrities and brands in America. In 1990, Mario has a higher Q rating among American kids than Mickey Mouse.

• 2:31:36Ben Gilbert?

  Whoa.

• 2:31:37David Rosenthal?

  Isn't that wild?

• 2:31:38Ben Gilbert?

  That is wild.

• 2:31:39David Rosenthal?

  And this is where they just start running away with it.

• 2:31:43Ben Gilbert?

  In 1990, this is when they have 95% of the video game market, right? In the US?

• 2:31:49David Rosenthal?

  Yes, this is like the peak. This is Nintendo at the peak of their power. The Sega Genesis, the Mega Drive in Japan had launched in 1988 in Japan and 89 in America. But it's a flop at first. It takes them a couple of years to figure out the marketing and how to compete against Nintendo. So Nintendo is just-

• 2:32:07Ben Gilbert?

  An unabated path.

• 2:32:09David Rosenthal?

  Unabated path, firing on all cylinders. They do things, just incredibly innovative things. They launch a 1-800 toll-free line for game counselors. This is incredible.

• 2:32:21Ben Gilbert?

  Do you know my personal story with this?

• 2:32:23David Rosenthal?

  No.

• 2:32:25Ben Gilbert?

  So my wife's mom worked in Redmond in the correspondence department for Nintendo, and they had two groups. One is the game counselors, and this is like super hardcore. Like you take a test. There's a great Netflix documentary that describes it called High Score. And it interviews, it's got footage of a bunch of people in the game counselor group right after they take their test and like they are on the phone, talking to people through levels and kids are calling up. And yeah, my mother-in-law worked in the correspondence department.

• 2:32:57David Rosenthal?

  The letters.

• 2:32:58Ben Gilbert?

  Letters. And so she was saying that they would get hundreds and hundreds of letters. They would answer every single one. And they were almost always like to illustrate and validate the point that like this was a- Little boy thing for a long time and teenage boy thing. She's like, basically, all the letters are from little kids, mostly little boys. And they're just like asking for help and like thanking Nintendo for making great games. And it's just this unbelievably heartwarming thing, but it also gave Nintendo such a direct relationship with customers.

• 2:33:31David Rosenthal?

  They eventually do make the phone line, I think it's the Nintendo power line, paid. But in the beginning, it's free. Think this is crazy. They are offering game counseling advice, like help with games.

• 2:33:44Ben Gilbert?

  For free.

• 2:33:45David Rosenthal?

  For free. This is an 11 star experience. Not only are we going to sell you the most powerful hardware on the market by years for a really cheap price, we are then going to give you a toll free number that you can call for free and we will help you play the games.

• 2:34:00Ben Gilbert?

  Cause they wanted to answer every single one. So they had 80 people regularly on staff, but during the holiday season, it would be like three, 400 people that they would staff up to, to handle all the calls.

• 2:34:09David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. This also tells you about the margins that they were making on the software.

• 2:34:14Ben Gilbert?

  I asked my mother in law about it last night and was, as I was getting ready for the episode, and she said it was like a pretty amazing place to work because as you can imagine, like, I don't think her logic was because it was so profitable, but the fact that it was so profitable and it was such a like central part of the country's zeitgeist trickles into the culture where like, everyone's doing well, everyone's having fun at work. The work itself is fun. It's such a like family safe, clean brand that like, there's only like upside to every interaction that you're having.

• 2:34:47David Rosenthal?

  So it's funny, right? Like this is a subsidiary of a Japanese company. So it's not like anybody working there has equity in what's happening.

• 2:34:55Ben Gilbert?

  Right.

• 2:34:55David Rosenthal?

  And in fact, they were all paid at or below market. But as one example of the money floating around, at one point Nintendo of America buys a bunch of properties in Hawaii and basically like creates their own internal like resort for Nintendo of America employees that you could like book to go take your family to Hawaii and stay in the Nintendo owned properties. And then we'll talk about this a little bit more next time, but they buy the Seattle Mariners. Can we talk about that?

• 2:35:24Ben Gilbert?

  Like. Yep.

• 2:35:27David Rosenthal?

  This is a very profitable enterprise.

• 2:35:29Ben Gilbert?

  Pretty amazing perks to get to work there. You end up with free game systems and free games and like you are a cool parent.

• 2:35:36David Rosenthal?

  So this is one half of the amazingly innovative direct relationship with customers that Nintendo of America comes up with. The other half is Nintendo Power. And it's crazy. I mean, like, doing the research for this, there are issues of Nintendo Power that sell on eBay today for thousands of dollars. The amount of brand affinity that this creates.

• 2:35:59Ben Gilbert?

  Well, I used to buy, so much of next episode is going to be about Pokemon, but I used to buy Nintendo Power for the maps of the Pokemon levels to be able to like, show you where you need to go walk to unlock something and where different Pokemon are found. And the idea that like, you're taking a pretty small screen. I mean, in my case, it was the Game Boy Color, but back in the Famicom days, it was, you know, still a pretty small snapshot of the world on the screen. And to be able to lay it out in a magazine format to really show you the whole thing, it helps you understand how to play the game so much better. And of course, there's editorial and of course, there's like secrets that they divulge. But I think this thing built up a pretty significant readership.

• 2:36:40David Rosenthal?

  Six million circulation.

• 2:36:42Ben Gilbert?

  Crazy, right?

• 2:36:43David Rosenthal?

  So here's what they do. Everybody who mails in the warranty card for an NES automatically gets added to the Nintendo Fun Club, Fan Club.

• 2:36:53Ben Gilbert?

  So they're getting all the addresses and names of every single one of their customers directly.

• 2:36:59David Rosenthal?

  Nintendo's head of marketing, Peter Main, and then Gail Tilden, who worked in the marketing department, came up with all this stuff and Gail ended up running Nintendo Power. So for the first kind of year of the NES in the US, they send out the Fun Club newsletter for free once a quarter to everybody who registers. And then they realized like, well, this could be so much more. So Gail starts an actual magazine, Nintendo Power. They send in the next mailing to everybody. They say, hey, you can subscribe for $15 a year to a monthly magazine. They instantly get a million and a half subscriptions. It's the fastest magazine to reach a million subscription circulation in the US in history and becomes one of the largest magazines in the country.

• 2:37:45Ben Gilbert?

  Wow.

• 2:37:46David Rosenthal?

  And so all this is amazing. So they, I think they eventually raised the cost of $20 a year. They get 6 million subscribers. So that's 120 million a year and high margin subscription revenue coming to Nintendo, dropping the bucket. What it's way, way, way more valuable for though, not just the relationship with the customers, it's for selling games.

• 2:38:07Ben Gilbert?

  Oh, amazing.

• 2:38:08David Rosenthal?

  So the game previews, they use Nintendo power to just juice all of the Nintendo first party and some third-party games. They control the entire ecosystem now, like the marketing channel to the customers, the retail experience within the stores, the hardware, the software, everything. It's one of the greatest businesses that's created of all time.

• 2:38:31Ben Gilbert?

  The Nintendo power strategy reminds me so much of the NFL with NFL Films and the NFL print division.

• 2:38:38David Rosenthal?

  Absolutely.

• 2:38:39Ben Gilbert?

  Not only are you doing what the NFL did, which is building hype around your media properties and all around all of your intellectual property, you are going one level further, as we just talked about, with you where you actually have a direct relationship with the customer. I mean, they built a 6 million plus CRM of people who bought Nintendo that they otherwise wouldn't have had their contact information, but now they have a new way to market stuff to them.

• 2:39:04David Rosenthal?

  Yep. It's just this incredible story.

• 2:39:06Ben Gilbert?

  So here's the craziest thing that I was trying to like contextualize some numbers. Remember how I said in 1989 Nintendo's sales were 10 times the market bottom?

• 2:39:18David Rosenthal?

  Yep.

• 2:39:18Ben Gilbert?

  That $1 billion of revenue relative to the 100 million low point. Well, two years later in 1990 Nintendo did almost 3 billion in revenue, which was the entire industry market size at its peak before the fall. Nintendo's revenue alone in 1990 is the same as the entire industry in 1983 at the height of the mania.

• 2:39:42David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, just incredible. I don't know if it first happened that year in 1990. It may have. The only thing I read and that I know for sure is that by 1992, Nintendo's profits, so not their revenue, but their profits surpassed all of the major movie studios and television networks combined. Isn't that wild?

• 2:40:05Ben Gilbert?

  It's so insane. So the NES, and I think it's probably about time to start tying a bow on the NES story here, would eventually sell 62 million consoles worldwide. I think we should save the Super Nintendo, Game Boy, and the whole battle with Sega as the beginning for part two. What do you think?

• 2:40:24David Rosenthal?

  Yes, that was my intention all along.

• 2:40:26Ben Gilbert?

  There's plenty of analysis to do just on part one here.

• 2:40:29David Rosenthal?

  This is the perfect place to leave it because here we are by the end of the NES Famicom generation, Nintendo has revived, rescued this industry from death's door, built one of the most impressive monopolies of all time in business anywhere in the world, and a global monopoly too. They can basically do no wrong. And what happens next is the fall from grace. And I think that's going to be the perfect place to start the next episode is how they fall and then how they come back.

• 2:41:08Ben Gilbert?

  Yep, agree. It's also worth pointing out a little bit at this point. So for fiscal 89, just to put some numbers around this, they did 1.84 billion in revenue and 217 million in earnings. So they're doing 12% ish net income margin, which is like good, but not as good as big tech companies today. And we're talking about how amazing the business model is, but like it is worth pointing out like just how much R and D they had, just how hard it was to manufacture a lot of this physical stuff. At this point in 89, they were heads down on two future generations of console, actually three, including the Virtual Boy. So there's a lot of like real expense in the business, even though they're blowing the doors off sales.

• 2:41:52David Rosenthal?

  I think that's true. I think that net income was probably suppressed and artificially low, perhaps in part because of all the cash sloshing around that they were using, but also all the international entities. I believe, I don't have the stat at my fingertips, but I believe operating margins were more in the 30 ish percent range.

• 2:42:13Ben Gilbert?

  Okay.

• 2:42:13David Rosenthal?

  So still not like tech companies today, but good.

• 2:42:16Ben Gilbert?

  Right. Spitting off hundreds of millions of dollars in cash is nice.

• 2:42:20David Rosenthal?

  Yes, there are a lot of ways that you can find tax efficient ways to hide those hundreds of millions of dollars.

• 2:42:26Ben Gilbert?

  That's a good point.

• 2:42:28David Rosenthal?

  All right, listeners, now is a great time to talk about one of our favorite companies, Statsig.

• 2:42:35Ben Gilbert?

  Yes, there is a reason why the best product teams rely on Statsig, whether they are iterating on their core product features or shipping AI-powered experiences at scale.

• 2:42:45David Rosenthal?

  Yep, in the crazy speed of today's AI world, shipping fast is just table stakes now. It's basically trivial to build and deploy your app constantly. The real advantage is how quickly you learn what changes actually created value for customers and how fast you can use that signal to guide what you ship next.

• 2:43:06Ben Gilbert?

  This is where Statsig comes in. It brings experimentation, feature flags, and product analytics into one unified system so teams can ship safely, test rigorously, and directly link what they changed to how users actually behaved.

• 2:43:18David Rosenthal?

  So if you want to make learning your competitive advantage, whether you're building new AI experiences or just evolving your existing core product, go to statsig.com/acquired to get started.

• 2:43:29Ben Gilbert?

  Before we get to analysis, I have two very fun asides for you that are little branches off this tree of story. And I'm curious if you found them because one is incredibly up your alley.

• 2:43:41David Rosenthal?

  This is my favorite part of every episode when you try and stump me.

• 2:43:44Ben Gilbert?

  I think so, too. So we talked about 1983 being a really crazy year for gaming. There was a company started in 1983 that was supposed to be a gaming company that became very large that was not a gaming company. Do you know what that is?

• 2:44:05David Rosenthal?

  Well, obviously, it's not Slack because that happened later.

• 2:44:07Ben Gilbert?

  Obviously, it's not Slack.

• 2:44:09David Rosenthal?

  Uh, let's see.

• 2:44:12David Rosenthal?

  Electronic Arts was started in 1982 by Trip Hawkins and is a gaming company. So you're not talking about that.

• 2:44:19Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. And it might be more fair to call it a game distribution company than a game developer. Again, it didn't really happen, so it's hard to say what it exactly would have been.

• 2:44:31David Rosenthal?

  You're also not talking about Netscape, which started as, obviously Mark Andreessen and Jim Clark of Silicon Graphics and University of Utah fame, which started with the initial business plan of building software for the N64.

• 2:44:46Ben Gilbert?

  But you're getting much warmer.

• 2:44:48David Rosenthal?

  Okay, okay. 1983.

• 2:44:53Ben Gilbert?

  The original company name was Control Video Corporation. It's probably not helpful.

• 2:44:58David Rosenthal?

  Oh, wait, I know this. This is the problem when you become a parent is like your mental acuity. Just like if I were a couple of years younger, I, we wouldn't be having this stage of the conversation. I already would be, but I gotta, I gotta cry, Uncle.

• 2:45:15Ben Gilbert?

  I'm going to keep giving you hints because like you're going to get this. It's like the Netscape story in every single way. They wanted to develop a way to internet connect a game console and instead became something like Netscape.

• 2:45:30David Rosenthal?

  Have we covered it on the show?

• 2:45:31Ben Gilbert?

  We have extremely early on and we did not paint it in a great light. And it is not Silicon Valley based. It's East Coast, Virginia based.

• 2:45:41David Rosenthal?

  Wow. I can't believe I'm still blanking on this.

• 2:45:44Ben Gilbert?

  I'm hoping there's listeners like screaming into their AirPods right now. It is.

• 2:45:49David Rosenthal?

  The question is, how much of this are we going to cut in post-production?

• 2:45:54Ben Gilbert?

  It is AOL.

• 2:45:55David Rosenthal?

  Oh my goodness.

• 2:45:57Ben Gilbert?

  So it started as Control Video Corporation in 1983. There was one product, an online game service called Game Line for the Atari 2600. And it had an amazing amount of very prescient technology. The ability to temporarily download a game, cache it locally on device and keep track of high scores. It would work by connecting a telephone line and Game Line would eventually go through some corporate restructuring and eventually emerge six years later as America Online.

• 2:46:27David Rosenthal?

  Wow. I can't believe I missed that. Here's a crazy total aside. When I was in business school at Stanford, the years 2012 to 2014. The AOL building in Palo Alto was still a central hub of things. So Stardex, the Stanford, you know, incubator that I was part of when I was there, was actually based out of the AOL building at that point in time. Like, isn't that wild? Like, even at that point in time, AOL still had its, you know, tendrils in Silicon Valley.

• 2:47:00Ben Gilbert?

  Wow. Okay, I've got another one. And I'm just gonna start telling the story.

• 2:47:05David Rosenthal?

  Score so far, Ben one, David zero.

• 2:47:07Ben Gilbert?

  Well, I don't know. I have all the stats in front of me. I don't know if there's me one.

• 2:47:10David Rosenthal?

  No, this is a game. You're doing the Nintendo episode. We gotta keep score.

• 2:47:14Ben Gilbert?

  All right, so hit your buzzer when you have a guess.

• 2:47:17David Rosenthal?

  Okay.

• 2:47:18Ben Gilbert?

  So in 1990, right where we ended our story, a small game developer approaches Nintendo to show off that they had ported the first level of Super Mario Brothers 3.

• 2:47:30David Rosenthal?

  Come on, that's too easy.

• 2:47:33David Rosenthal?

  Carmack and Romero.

• 2:47:34Ben Gilbert?

  This is a crazy story.

• 2:47:36David Rosenthal?

  Do you know what ID's first name was before they shortened it to id Software?

• 2:47:40Ben Gilbert?

  I mean, you just read the book, so this isn't fair.

• 2:47:42David Rosenthal?

  No, I actually got this, I'm sure it's in the book, but from research for this episode that I had completely forgotten.

• 2:47:48Ben Gilbert?

  Uh, I do not know.

• 2:47:50David Rosenthal?

  When I looked at video of what you were talking about.

• 2:47:53Ben Gilbert?

  What is it, like SMB 3 DOS or something?

• 2:47:55David Rosenthal?

  No, no, it's related to it. It's ideas from the deep.

• 2:47:57Ben Gilbert?

  Oh, cool.

• 2:47:58David Rosenthal?

  So what happened was John Carmack, one of these geniuses that Yamuchi was identified and talking about, had engineered, and I understand this so much better now, having done the NES episode, this is why what Carmack did at ID was so incredible. He had developed in software a way for generic PCs to do side-scrolling graphics like the NES. This was incredible because the reason the NES could do this was because of the picture processing unit, the PPU, that we talked all about. Regular PCs only had a CPU. They couldn't do this. Carmack wrote software that enabled it and then they famously made a demo version of Super Mario Brothers 3 for the PC and showed it to Nintendo.

• 2:48:43Ben Gilbert?

  And we didn't talk about Super Mario Brothers 3, but like that is widely held to be the best Super Mario Brothers. One was the original, two was too hard, three was like widely anticipated and then it came out and just was like even better than everybody thought it could be.

• 2:48:56David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, three was amazing, but so you can find video, we'll link to it in the show notes. You can find video that came out decades after the fact of the actual id demo that Carmack coded up. Like it was lost. I think somebody found it on an old machine at some point in time recently. And so there's like YouTube, like you can go get video of watching it play. It's amazing. It's so incredible what Carmack did, but the background of it. So they have the background of the desktop. They have it in a window playing on a PC.

• 2:49:26Ben Gilbert?

  Huh. Which you still can't do unless you're running a Nintendo emulator on your computer.

• 2:49:30David Rosenthal?

  An emulator. Yeah, yeah. I guess it was 3.1 maybe at that point in time. Windows 3.1.

• 2:49:36Ben Gilbert?

  It was DOS based.

• 2:49:37David Rosenthal?

  Oh, it was DOS based. Well, there was whatever the GUI was that they had on top of it because they had a GUI to play that game. So the background wallpaper of the GUI just said IFD, IFD, IFD, IFD and rose across the screen. I'm like, what the hell is IFD? And then I figured out it was Ideas from the Deep.

• 2:49:54Ben Gilbert?

  Oh, that's awesome. So here's how the story goes. So he invents in an unbelievably genius way on this architecture, a way to do the side scrolling Mario thing. And they approached Nintendo and he's like, look at this market opportunity I've discovered for you. Can we be the developer of Nintendo's entry onto the PC, Mario on PC? And Nintendo thinks about it and they say, no, because we only want Mario to be available on the NES to promote console sales, which of course is the right decision.

• 2:50:24David Rosenthal?

  Of course.

• 2:50:24Ben Gilbert?

  So they turned down the short term money to promote long-term stability. But id would then go on to rip Mario out of that PC side scroller and turn that into Commander Keen. So Carmack and Romero would then of course go on to create Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake. There is some alternate world where Nintendo could have said yes, and those could have been Nintendo games.

• 2:50:51David Rosenthal?

  The alternate worlds in this episode are wild. Like, the Atari NES, doomed by Nintendo.

• 2:50:58Ben Gilbert?

  The internet being AOL on Atari devices.

• 2:51:03David Rosenthal?

  Right. We're not going to talk about it on this episode, but Netscape being an N64 information superhighway-based technology platform.

• 2:51:12Ben Gilbert?

  Crazy. All right, well, let's get into analysis here.

• 2:51:17David Rosenthal?

  Let's do it. Should we start with powers, as usual?

• 2:51:21Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, let's do it.

• 2:51:22David Rosenthal?

  So for folks who are new to the show, as always, we run each company we analyze through Hamilton Helmer's wonderful seven powers framework, where he identifies seven ways by which a company can earn persistent differential profit margins versus its competitors in any given industry, AKA have power in its industry. The seven powers are counterpositioning, scale economies, switching costs, network economies, process power, branding, and cornered resources. All right, let's get into it for Nintendo.

• 2:51:52Ben Gilbert?

  Well said. Far and above, number one, in my opinion, is scale economies. We have done all but name it.

• 2:51:59David Rosenthal?

  Not network economies.

• 2:52:00Ben Gilbert?

  Well, it's a good question.

• 2:52:03David Rosenthal?

  Keep going with scale economies. I mean, I agree.

• 2:52:05Ben Gilbert?

  The reason scale economies jumped to mind is we just keep talking about it on this episode without naming it. And when we talk about things like Nintendo produced the most desirable console, which all the consumers bought, which then meant that Nintendo had power over its developers. That is a pure play scale economy, that a game was worth way more on Nintendo for the NES's distribution than it was worth anywhere else. And so if you're a developer, it almost doesn't matter how bad the terms are with Nintendo. You have to build for Nintendo because there's more money there, because it's amortized across so many different users of the platform, that it's just always worth it.

• 2:52:48David Rosenthal?

  Okay, so I totally agree with you. I think this is the number one source of power. Isn't this network economies, though? A two-sided network effect? The more users you have on your installed base, the more attractive you are to developers, the more embedded 10x, 100x developers you have developing for your platform, the more likely you are to attract more users?

• 2:53:06Ben Gilbert?

  It's a good question. I mean, I think the scale economies, when you define it, is that you can make a fixed cost investment that is more valuable to you than it is your competitors, because you can spread that cost across more customers that can sort of pay it back in a bigger way. And so because you have more customers to spread it across, that fixed cost investment is more valuable to you, Nintendo, than it would be to your nearest competitor. Like, the fact that Netflix can pay more for content because they have more people watching.

• 2:53:40David Rosenthal?

  I think this might actually be a special case of both network and scale economies, where it's both as a fused together.

• 2:53:47Ben Gilbert?

  If Nintendo was acquiring the games, then it would be pure-play scale economies. But they're not. They're convincing developers to build on their system.

• 2:53:57David Rosenthal?

  Yes, but there is a strong component of scale economies here, too. I think you're on to something that these are linked, because it's all about the hardware R&D cycle. Because you have to invest an enormous fixed cost of both money, and, you know, for everybody now, but at the first for Nintendo's time, in developing a superior hardware platform. That is a scale economy advantage. And then that directly links to the network economy of like, because you can have that scale economy advantage on the hardware platform, then you can get the network economy effect going of consumers and developers.

• 2:54:33Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. Interestingly enough, Nintendo historically hasn't done a great job of leveraging a large install base to advantage them with the next platform. We'll talk about this next episode, but like, their success in the N64 did not carry through to the next generation with GameCube. They were sort of starting from zero again.

• 2:54:59David Rosenthal?

  It started even before then, and these were like, this is, we'll talk about this a lot more in the next episode, but an incredible self-inflicted wound that Nintendo, as part of killing their dominance, they didn't have backward compatibility at every early generation. The Super Nintendo was not backwards compatible with the NES. The N64 was not backwards compatible with the Super Nintendo. The GameCube was not backwards compatible with the N64. They completely whiffed on this really important lesson.

• 2:55:27Ben Gilbert?

  And so console R&D is actually not a scale economy, because you don't have the benefit of all the people that bought your old console. To amortize the cost of your new console across because you don't know how many people are going to buy the new console. And so I think that's something they've sort of woken up to with the Switch, again, foreshadowing here, but to the extent where the next big console that Nintendo comes out with is a Switch and is super Switch compatible, then they actually start entering the scale economies game where they can make the biggest, best piece of hardware if they can get more people paying a sort of subscription.

• 2:56:00David Rosenthal?

  Well, that they can port their existing user base over to the

• 2:56:03Ben Gilbert?

  Yes.

• 2:56:04David Rosenthal?

  They first are doing it with the Wii, which not coincidentally is their big comeback. The Wii could play GameCube games, but we're getting ahead of ourselves.

• 2:56:12Ben Gilbert?

  Definitely we are. But you're right. I think there's sort of some scale economy, some network economy here, but we're both describing the same phenomenon.

• 2:56:20David Rosenthal?

  You know, it's interesting. I remember back from my days at GSB at Stanford, one of my favorite professors, a professor named Susan Athie, who then later would join the rover.com board with me and I get to re-intersect with her there. A wonderful, wonderful person, incredibly smart. She was, in addition to being a professor at GSB, the chief economist at Microsoft. And a lot of her work was on Xbox and the video game industry.

• 2:56:46Ben Gilbert?

  That'd be such a hard spreadsheet to make to figure out.

• 2:56:48David Rosenthal?

  Oh, totally. Her academic specialty is network effects. Like, everything she did was network effects and video game consoles and software is like the textbook classic definition of the two-sided network effects. And I remember reading all about it in her class. Like, I was like, oh, this is so cool. Yeah. So no question to me that both network effects and scale economies are huge sources of power for Nintendo here.

• 2:57:15Ben Gilbert?

  Miyamoto definitely has process power.

• 2:57:17David Rosenthal?

  Yep. And he's a cornered resource for Nintendo.

• 2:57:20Ben Gilbert?

  There's something that happens in his group where they come out with an unbelievably creative game concept that I'm sure at first, much like Pixar movies, I'm sure the first cut isn't super fun, but they have a way of turning it into fun and weeding out things that aren't fun. That is absolutely process power because I bet it would be really hard for him to write it down.

• 2:57:41David Rosenthal?

  Totally. And I'm sure a lot of people listening to this know by heart all of the games that Miyamoto has made. But, you know, for folks who don't, you know, we mentioned a couple, but like, I mean, he is the, he is the Beatles of video games, like solely like.

• 2:57:55Ben Gilbert?

  He's probably the best game designer to ever live.

• 2:57:57David Rosenthal?

  No doubt about it. And in fact, there's this amazing story of, I think it was in the 90s, when Paul McCartney was touring in Japan, he contacted Nintendo, he wanted to meet Shigeru Miyamoto. Like, he had such like reverence for him. But all the Mario games, Mario 64, which, you know, has revolutionized the industry, the first true 3D game, Legend of Zelda, A Link to the Past on the Super Nintendo, The Ocarina of Time on N64, Breath of the Wild now for Switch.

• 2:58:26Ben Gilbert?

  Did he design Breath of the Wild?

• 2:58:28David Rosenthal?

  Well, so he's the head of Nintendo's games. So he's the producer.

• 2:58:32Ben Gilbert?

  Producer.

• 2:58:33David Rosenthal?

  He's the producer now on the Zelda series, and there are other directors below him. But like, it's all his process power.

• 2:58:39Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. By the way, new Breath of the Wild, or what do they call it, Tears of the Kingdom, comes out next month.

• 2:58:45David Rosenthal?

  Which is, I have a confession to make. I've never been the biggest Zelda fan. Like, I like them. I play them, and I thought Breath of the Wild was great. It's just not my total, like, style. But, I mean, there are people who named their children Zelda.

• 2:58:59Ben Gilbert?

  Totally.

• 2:58:59David Rosenthal?

  A lot of people who named their children Zelda after the video game.

• 2:59:03Ben Gilbert?

  And you and I both talked to some games industry people preparing for this episode, and from real core gamer type people, it's amazing how much reverence they have for Breath of the Wild, where like, everyone just looks at it like, wow, how do they manage to pull this off? Because it's not for a core gaming audience.

• 2:59:23David Rosenthal?

  And it was, once again, to the point of process power, it was a similar situation at a smaller scale, where open world games were dead. They'd been totally overdone, oversaturated, the market was sick of them. And here along comes Nintendo and Miyamoto, and completely re-envisioned and re-energizes the genre.

• 2:59:43Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. So back to the powers. Is there counter positioning in the way that Nintendo created cabinet games? Or maybe in the general concept of we're not about the fastest and newest?

• 2:59:56David Rosenthal?

  Absolutely. I think there's plenty of counter positioning all throughout Nintendo history. And I think there's several examples here in this chapter of the story, or these chapters of the story. One with narrative-driven games and Donkey Kong. Two, though, with the Famicom and the NES relative to especially the rest of the American video game industry, right? It's like, we're about a small number of high-quality games, not a large number of crappy games.

• 3:00:23Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. Again, this will show up in the next episode, not this one, but switching costs.

• 3:00:26David Rosenthal?

  Hundred percent.

• 3:00:27Ben Gilbert?

  If Nintendo had a viable competitor in the late 80s, they'd be switching costs, but there weren't. And so that'll show up in the Sega battle of once you pick a side, you're sort of dug into that side, at least for the next six, seven years.

• 3:00:37David Rosenthal?

  And for the majority of the market in both America and Japan, families are only going to buy one console system that they're going to buy all their games on. Like, there is a subset of the market that is going to buy both the Super Nintendo and the Sega Genesis, but that's a small subset. Like, today, most households are going to choose between the PlayStation and the Xbox. And it's interesting that Nintendo is a third alternative thing. But yeah, 100% switching costs. My god, I think Nintendo might have every single one of these powers. I'm looking at this.

• 3:01:08Ben Gilbert?

  I don't think they have branding.

• 3:01:10David Rosenthal?

  Well, they do now with their IP.

• 3:01:13Ben Gilbert?

  I don't know that that's branding, though. The definition of branding is if you receive two identical objects and you're willing to pay more money to buy from a firm with branding power.

• 3:01:23David Rosenthal?

  Hmm, great point. And IP is a cornered resource, not branding.

• 3:01:27Ben Gilbert?

  The reason you buy something from Nintendo is all sorts of reasons, but not because it says Nintendo. Like, their nearest competitor doesn't have any of the same features and capabilities that they have. It doesn't have the games. It doesn't have the same form factor. In the later years, it's like that your friends don't have it, so you can't play online. Like, there's lots of differentiation. It's not like a bank or insurance company where everybody's competing in a commoditized way, and so brand really matters.

• 3:01:54David Rosenthal?

  Two thoughts. I think Nintendo does have brand power, but I think it is the weakest of the seven that it has. It's just incredible. I think it has all seven, but the brand power, I think, is a smaller piece of the story and its brand power around the seal of quality, and especially with parents and in this era. If I buy my kids a Nintendo system, I can be very sure that there's not going to be excessive blood and guts. There's not going to be sexual content. There's not going to be profanity. I think that's definitely branding because the Genesis brands against that.

• 3:02:30Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, that's true. They counter position there. I guess the reason I bring it up is because it never actually comes down to branding because there are so few competitors that they differentiate in all sorts of ways that they don't actually need to rely on branding. You could argue, maybe in the modern era, the Xbox versus PlayStation war is actually more of a branding power for one versus the other of why you would pick since they're less differentiated. But Nintendo is wildly differentiated in the IP that is on their platforms and nowhere else.

• 3:02:59David Rosenthal?

  I mean, at a minimum, I think they score super strong on six out of seven powers during this era.

• 3:03:05Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:05David Rosenthal?

  The cornered resource being the IP, process power we talked about with Miyamoto, network economies and scale economies probably being chief among these, switching costs for sure, counter positioning, yes. Like, wow, have we ever covered a company like this?

• 3:03:18Ben Gilbert?

  I don't think so.

• 3:03:19David Rosenthal?

  I don't think so either. And it reflects in what happened. Like, they had 95% global market share in this enormous industry.

• 3:03:27Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, and perfect timing. All right, playbook. We've talked about a lot of these, so I don't want to just revisit some. I want to bring up some that I think are kind of new. So Mario as a character, and I pulled this out of the Super Mario book from going deep on that franchise, is so perfect because he's so universal. It's story driven, but there's not that much personality. So anybody can sort of see themselves in Mario. Whereas if you're playing more of a core game and you're like, or even an RPG of any sort.

• 3:03:56David Rosenthal?

  Oh, RPGs. Yeah, absolutely.

• 3:03:58Ben Gilbert?

  Your experience, a story that's unfolding before you as an observer.

• 3:04:03David Rosenthal?

  It's like reading a book.

• 3:04:04Ben Gilbert?

  Right. But in Mario, you know, there's not enough depth to Mario to say like, I'm observing Mario. You just are Mario. And that's like the perfect casual gaming character to just massively expand the gaming audience beyond teenage boys and make it the most accessible ever.

• 3:04:23David Rosenthal?

  Yep, completely agree. It's also interesting to note, though, during this era too, and again, as to how powerful Nintendo was as a platform, they also had all of the great opposite kinds of games. The Dragon Quests, the Final Fantasies, you know, the hardcore art story-driven RPGs.

• 3:04:42Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. Mario is also fun every time. You don't get sick of the music. The levels were easy to play but hard to master. Most of the levels only had small tweaks between that stage and the next stage, but somehow it still felt fresh and new every time, especially in this era where like a lot of the competitors' games, you'd quickly tire of them. Like you could play Mario for 150 hours and it would still feel fresh and new every time. And that's an extremely difficult thing. That is why Miyamoto is such a genius.

• 3:05:13David Rosenthal?

  Yep. He does this genius thing of incredible world building, especially starting with Super Mario Brothers of like you're in the Mushroom Kingdom and like it's this incredible fantasy world, but it's story-driven, not narrative-driven. So like you can create your own narrative within the world.

• 3:05:31Ben Gilbert?

  Right. You know, it's funny that the Popeye IP stuff didn't work out because like it was their first choice to use Popeye IP, but by not getting it, they ended up creating this unbelievably valuable franchise with Mario. And I pulled some numbers. You mentioned 385 million Super Mario games were sold cumulatively. And so that gets beat by Tetris, Pokemon, Call of Duty, and GTA in terms of like total franchise copies sold ever. But Mario, if you sort of pop up a level and include Mario Kart and Mario Party, that's 826 million copies of Mario games sold, which definitely makes it the best-selling franchise of all time.

• 3:06:15David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. Wow.

• 3:06:16Ben Gilbert?

  It's so valuable. And in fact, Nintendo leaned into this. This is another sort of clever thing. They did not allow licensing of other characters. If you wanted to license a Nintendo character for a backpack or a lunchbox, or one of the other 10,000 things people have licensed Nintendo IP for, for the longest time, they would only grant you a Mario license. Because they wanted to build a mascot. They wanted to build so much IP and brand value into the Mario character that he became Mickey Mouse.

• 3:06:51David Rosenthal?

  Ah, interesting. So they concentrated the effort as opposed to having Kirby licenses, or Link licenses, or Zelda licenses.

• 3:06:59Ben Gilbert?

  Right. It's interesting what that allowed them to do because it made Mario more than a plumber. It made it so that when Mario appears in other games, it doesn't feel strange because Mario just means Nintendo. It doesn't mean side-scrolling plumber character, which was another clever creative decision where he's just like, oh, he's the Nintendo mascot. And sure, he's got a game of his own, but he shows up in all these places. And it keeps going back to like, it's important for him to not have that much character depth because it makes it so that he can be super universal as the mascot.

• 3:07:28David Rosenthal?

  Yep. Great point.

• 3:07:30Ben Gilbert?

  There's one more in this train of thought. And this'll be, I think, a big theme of the next episode. But the fact that Nintendo platforms are first and foremost for Nintendo IP. And they love making high-margin revenue on other developers. And they're going to say no to a lot of developers because they're inappropriate for the platform, or they don't deem it a good game, or whatever other finicky belief that they have that it's not Nintendo in some way. But unlike other platforms where they have a launch title and sort of a mascot for the platform, that's just like to juice the initial sales of the platform so that they get a network effect and then they can really make money from the third-party developers. Nintendo...

• 3:08:14Ben Gilbert?

  Has such good owned IP that I think they would be delighted just making the NES and the SNES and the Game Boy, and it's only ever their games on it. And the way that that has compounded out over all these years is that they own some of the most differentiated IP in the entire world and basically the only globally recognizable video game IP in the entire world. And in second place is Pokemon and they own a third of that. I think it was probably accidental at first, but then, once they realized the value of what they had, they were super protective of it.

• 3:08:48David Rosenthal?

  Yep. Well, and with Pokemon too, we'll again, talk about this more next time, but they only own a third of the IP, but they own Pokemon only being on Nintendo platforms, to your point.

• 3:09:00Ben Gilbert?

  Correct. Yeah. It's very Bernard Arnault. It's control more so than economics. All right. What do you got?

• 3:09:06David Rosenthal?

  The one big playbook theme that I want to talk about, Peter Main, who we mentioned, was Nintendo of America's VP of Marketing, and he, along with Gail Tilden and others, were really responsible for like the core of the innovation that came from the American side of the business. He codified what ultimately became the company's sort of unofficial slogan, besides like, do everything to be a monopoly without using the word monopoly, but we'll put that aside for a minute. The phrase he comes up with is, "The name of the game is the game." And I think this is like such a key to understanding Nintendo and so applicable elsewhere. And specifically,

• 3:09:47David Rosenthal?

  I think like all great personal and corporate encapsulations, it's both 100% true and 100% ridiculous and not true. And so what he means and what Nintendo means by it is that the quality of the games that we make and that others make for the platform. Is the name of the game. That is all that matters. The quality of the product, the quality of the games. If we make and make available exclusively the very best games out there on our platform, we will win. And that's 100% true. Like, that is what matters. And that's part of Yamamoto's true genius was as a complete outsider recognizing that,

• 3:10:27David Rosenthal?

  like, the Shigeru Miyamoto's, you know, the Gumpay Yokoh's are like the key to making all this work.

• 3:10:35Ben Gilbert?

  Right.

• 3:10:36David Rosenthal?

  At the same time, though, the reason it's utterly ridiculous and doubly ridiculous because Peter Main coins it, he does everything besides make the games. And that is so important, too. Like, it really comes down like product and distribution. Both are really important.

• 3:10:51Ben Gilbert?

  Well, also, like, the best CMO's party line is our product is just so amazing, it sells itself. That's exactly what you hear there.

• 3:10:59David Rosenthal?

  But I think Nintendo is such a perfect case study of this, of like this dichotomy, and they are both so true. Nintendo has the best products, the best IP, the best games. They also, especially in this era, had the best distribution channels, the best relationships with their customers, the best control over their ecosystem.

• 3:11:19Ben Gilbert?

  The best strategy, generally.

• 3:11:21David Rosenthal?

  The best strategy, right. And man, when you can marry both of those, that's when you get 95% global market share.

• 3:11:29Ben Gilbert?

  This was my sort of final question and my, the playbook themes that I had written down that I wanted to pose to you. What other businesses ever have had 95% market share? Or maybe the interesting one might be like what businesses today? Because this isn't like a narrowly scoped market. This 95% represents global video games. You know, it's not like browser market share on iOS devices or something like that. It's like global video games.

• 3:11:59David Rosenthal?

  The only one that immediately comes to mind is, I think, Apple and iOS, not of revenue, but of profits, Apple and iOS have something, you know, on the order of that of global market share of smartphone profits.

• 3:12:13Ben Gilbert?

  Smartphone profits, yep. The other one that's like close, but I think is more around 85 to 90% is search, US-based search engine usage.

• 3:12:24David Rosenthal?

  I mean, I guess at a certain point, Facebook had something like that of social networking across all of their family of products.

• 3:12:34Ben Gilbert?

  The day before Instagram launched.

• 3:12:36David Rosenthal?

  Where the day they acquired Instagram.

• 3:12:38Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 3:12:39David Rosenthal?

  And WhatsApp, like during that heyday.

• 3:12:42Ben Gilbert?

  And the most interesting thing is like, all the examples we're naming are under heavy regulatory review and pressure. And another one that I was going to raise is Microsoft's share of the operating system market.

• 3:12:56David Rosenthal?

  Yep.

• 3:12:56Ben Gilbert?

  You know, that probably was something like 95% also.

• 3:13:00David Rosenthal?

  Or Microsoft Office, too.

• 3:13:02Ben Gilbert?

  And every single one of these have gone under significant DOJ concerns. And Nintendo never seemed to, and is it like, people viewed this as a toy market that was like, not terribly important to our economy? I mean, it is a much smaller market. In 1990, they were only doing $3 billion in revenue. It's not like these companies that are doing $100 billion in revenue.

• 3:13:23David Rosenthal?

  I think there's this really weird dynamic with Nintendo, which is why I'm so happy we're doing this episode, that it's just kind of overlooked and underappreciated as a business story.

• 3:13:33Ben Gilbert?

  Yes.

• 3:13:33David Rosenthal?

  Partially for the reasons you're saying, partially because it's a Japanese company, and so there's this like weird bicultural thing.

• 3:13:40Ben Gilbert?

  And the belief that it's so hits driven makes people think like, oh, well, it's probably whatever market share they've accumulated surely isn't durable.

• 3:13:48David Rosenthal?

  Yep. But yeah, like, and even there's such great books, as we said at the top of the episode, out there and work and documentaries on Nintendo. But there are ones from a business perspective, but they're not like, nobody's covering Nintendo like people are covering Apple.

• 3:14:02Ben Gilbert?

  No, everyone's covering Nintendo for the nostalgia of the character development and the fan service.

• 3:14:08David Rosenthal?

  Right. And yet, the business story is just as good.

• 3:14:12Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. All right. I, even though we killed it, want to do grading on this episode.

• 3:14:17David Rosenthal?

  Love it.

• 3:14:17Ben Gilbert?

  If your game, I think Baron Ball is stupid since we know the history from 1990 to 2023. So like, let's actually grade.

• 3:14:25David Rosenthal?

  Oh, man. That would be really interesting to do if we could go back in time and not know what happened next. But obviously, we can't do that.

• 3:14:32Ben Gilbert?

  That's true. Would we think that like Nintendo was going to take over the world and expand beyond gaming?

• 3:14:37David Rosenthal?

  Probably.

• 3:14:38Ben Gilbert?

  Would we think that gaming would go from a $3 billion market to a 120, 150, whatever it is billion dollar market now? That would have been a tough prediction to make.

• 3:14:48David Rosenthal?

  I bet we would think what Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen thought, which is that Nintendo is going to become the computer.

• 3:14:55Ben Gilbert?

  The window to the internet. Yeah.

• 3:14:57David Rosenthal?

  And we would not at all have predicted that just gaming itself was the thing and would become a $150 billion market. We would have said it'd be a $150 billion market, but of something else.

• 3:15:07Ben Gilbert?

  Right. Oh, that's a good point. Cause it's, you're out on a limb if you try to make the prediction in 1990 that gaming becomes a $150 billion market.

• 3:15:16David Rosenthal?

  Totally.

• 3:15:16Ben Gilbert?

  But it's a nice little hedge to be like, oh, I totally think Nintendo could address a $150 billion opportunity, but it'll be a bunch of stuff. It's almost like all the people in 2016, when asked about crypto, they were like, oh, I'm not so sure about Bitcoin, but I think the blockchain is going to be a fundamental technology. It's like, it's the way to hedge. And you're like, oh, I don't know exactly what the AI use cases are yet, but I'm sure it's going to be huge.

• 3:15:41David Rosenthal?

  Yep. Okay. That was kind of a fun, like.

• 3:15:44Ben Gilbert?

  What would have happened otherwise? Yeah.

• 3:15:46David Rosenthal?

  Okay. But grading.

• 3:15:47Ben Gilbert?

  Grading. So I suppose the interesting thing is to take it from a shareholder perspective in, call it the late 60s, early 70s through 1990. Let's just say the 20 year span from 70 to 90.

• 3:16:03David Rosenthal?

  Yep.

• 3:16:04Ben Gilbert?

  You know, how do you feel about Nintendo relative to being a shareholder of anything else? And it was hard, especially because of all the exchange rates and the changing inflation in Japan and inflation in the US and all these decades that have happened since then. But it seems like the market cap in 1990 of Nintendo is in the like 15 billion-ish category, which by today's standards, of course, seems quite small and we're like 15 billion dollar companies are inconsequential when stacked up against big tech.

• 3:16:36David Rosenthal?

  Right. But was huge back then, especially because there was all this weirdness of having to buy a Japanese listed company and whatnot. And like, most of the global capital markets are not based in Japan.

• 3:16:46Ben Gilbert?

  Right. But one question I did have is in your notes, do you have any in the 70s, any revenue figure? Because we know that it was around 3 billion in 1990.

• 3:16:57David Rosenthal?

  I do not. I got to imagine it was inconsequential compared to what it would become.

• 3:17:03Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. So the framing is it rounds to zero and then 20 years later it goes to 3 billion in revenue, 15 billion in market cap. From a market addressability perspective, it's interesting that what happened is they had literal perfect timing to enter a market that would become a 100-plus billion dollar market. And they went in and they captured 95% of it. So like, what I should be saying to you is, this is an A+. No question. They couldn't be positioned any better and they couldn't have executed it any better. Oh, and they own the customer relationships and they own all the IP and they have immaculate control over the whole thing. But I was thinking about it and the reason I don't think it is

• 3:17:43Ben Gilbert?

  an A+ is because of the fall that will happen at the beginning of the next episode, which is like, they kind of blew a lead where they were up by 10 runs in the bottom of the ninth. And maybe the technology wasn't available at the time to have further lock-in, but it does feel like if the gaming industry was going to grow from 3 billion to 100-plus billion over 30 years, it's kind of amazing that Nintendo didn't manage to surf on top of that wave, but kind of ended up getting clobbered by it two or three more times before figuring out how to really find their place there.

• 3:18:19David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. And I think had some really unforced, you know, own goal errors there along the way. Like Nintendo very much could have embraced backward compatibility on each of their console cycles. Nintendo very much could have embraced the CD format, you know, and failed spectacularly at both of those.

• 3:18:38Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, so I guess I'm an A and I would be an A+ but for the fact that we do know the future and we do know that they weren't as positioned as well as the numbers would state. I think that's why it's hard to be an investor and specifically hard to be a public company investor because the numbers can tell you one story, but then there are either execution problems in the form of unforced errors or black swan events, or the world sort of changes in ways that you absolutely could not have predicted by just looking at numbers.

• 3:19:08David Rosenthal?

  Yep. It's so hard. I mean, I'm absolutely inclined to agree with you, given that we know what happens. Next. On the other hand, if you purely scope it to this period of time, like, these guys executed 10 out of 10 during the, you know, 1970 to 1990.

• 3:19:25Ben Gilbert?

  Complete masterclass in business strategy and execution.

• 3:19:29David Rosenthal?

  Yep. Like we were saying earlier, we've never covered a company that scored so high on so many of the powers.

• 3:19:35Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. All right. Give me your grade, David.

• 3:19:38David Rosenthal?

  I hear your argument. I love it. That's the reason we're doing it the second episode, but I'm gonna give them an A+ for 1970 to 1990.

• 3:19:46Ben Gilbert?

  There you have it.

• 3:19:47David Rosenthal?

  There we are. Carve outs?

• 3:19:49Ben Gilbert?

  Carve outs. By the time this episode comes out, the Oscars will have happened, so you will know if this already is Best Picture or not. But even if it is not, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once was exceptional, and I highly recommend it.

• 3:20:02David Rosenthal?

  Oh, yeah. You've told me before that that was amazing.

• 3:20:05Ben Gilbert?

  Really good. Have I recommended it on the show? Am I double carve outing?

• 3:20:08David Rosenthal?

  I can't remember. I know you've told me about it. It's hard to separate, like, our conversations on the show and not on the show, you know?

• 3:20:15Ben Gilbert?

  It's a great couples movie, but it's also a great sort of like indie film. Like, it's a feel-good movie to watch together. I also recommend watching it alone because I think it's just a great piece of like independent filmmaking. It is unbelievably VFX-heavy, which you don't expect from the first 20 minutes. You're gonna start watching this movie and be like, what do you mean that this is unbelievably VFX-heavy? But it was done by a four-person team, and it's like a completely different take on VFX. It's not like Avatar, The Way of Water, let's go spend $250 million to create a film. I think it's like a $25 million total budget where it's almost like, let's show off how amazing After Effects and other state-of-the-art software that can run on your computer have gotten.

• 3:21:01David Rosenthal?

  Did they use like Unreal Engine to do some of it?

• 3:21:04Ben Gilbert?

  I imagine, I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I gotta watch more YouTube videos like behind the scenes.

• 3:21:10David Rosenthal?

  Which is funny, right? Like, we spent a lot of time on this episode. Of course, the natural comparison is video games versus music and movies, but like, it's all converging.

• 3:21:18Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. Well, but there is a key difference with video games, which you pointed out earlier, which is like, it is a different part of your brain in terms of, am I experiencing the media? Is it coming at me passively? Or do I have to be active in the media?

• 3:21:32David Rosenthal?

  Oh, yeah, totally agree. I think there will always be separate industries, but like, the tools and the technology are converging. My carve out slash outs are two related ones. Michael Lewis interviews. For whatever reason, I got like, on a kick of listening to Michael Lewis, and I just love Michael Lewis so much. And I went back and I listened to, I think either you or I have before had as a carve out his interview with Tim Ferriss a couple of years ago, which is so great. That got me on a kick of seeing what else is out there. You know, he definitely has his like, everybody does his quiver of stories that he pulls out. So you listen to a few and you're like, okay, I've heard you talk about this like 16 times. But I found one that I'm so glad I did. Deep cut on YouTube. It's a three hour interview

• 3:22:17David Rosenthal?

  on C-SPAN on Book TV. I think it's even on C-SPAN 2. I have no idea why Michael did this. But it was from a couple of years ago. And it's by far the longest one out there. And like, he goes like, three clicks deeper on everything. It was just fascinating to like, hear all like, the real deep cut Michael Lewis stories.

• 3:22:39Ben Gilbert?

  I thought I had listened to all of his interviews, so I can't wait to listen.

• 3:22:41David Rosenthal?

  I've got YouTube Premium, which is amazing. So I've been listening to it in podcast form, like without the video while I go and run some walks and stuff.

• 3:22:48Ben Gilbert?

  It's the only way to live.

• 3:22:49David Rosenthal?

  Only way to live. Oh, I can't believe I went so many years without YouTube Premium.

• 3:22:54Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. What is it? 10 bucks a month? It's a pretty easy 10 bucks a month.

• 3:22:57David Rosenthal?

  I mean, literally, you're valuing your time. If you don't pay for YouTube Premium and you watch any amount of YouTube, you're saying that like, my time on all these ads is worth like, zero.

• 3:23:10Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. I mean, if they were better ads, I'd be more inclined to pay attention.

• 3:23:15David Rosenthal?

  Right. It's not like these are like high-quality brand, you know, acquired style, like, you know, ads where you want to hear about, I mean, YouTube ads or YouTube ads.

• 3:23:23Ben Gilbert?

  It's like, oh, Sprite. I guess I had your drink Sprite. Huh. Never mind that I haven't drank a sugar soda in 15 years, but sure, show me another Sprite ad.

• 3:23:31David Rosenthal?

  Right.

• 3:23:32Ben Gilbert?

  All right. Anyway, listeners, we'll give you the rest of your fifth hour back, fourth hour back, whatever it is. Thank you for coming on the journey with us. You can join the revamped, reinvigorated Acquired LP program and become a limited partner.

• 3:23:45David Rosenthal?

  Oh, since we're at the end of the episode, I thought about doing this earlier, but I thought, let's just get right into the, into Nintendo. But now that we're at the end, I can say the inspiration for how we've revamped the Acquired LP program, where one of the core things we want to do is involve LPs in the audience and helping us choose topics that we cover on the show, was inspired by my favorite video game podcast, which does this.

• 3:24:07Ben Gilbert?

  Ah.

• 3:24:08David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, the great folks over at Resonant Arc. They are a video game book club podcast. So they play video games like a book club and they choose a game to cover. And their Patreon, the key benefit of being their Patreon is you can vote on the next game that they cover. And I was like, that's brilliant. We should do that on Acquired.

• 3:24:25Ben Gilbert?

  It is brilliant. So LPs, I would say maybe like a week after this episode comes out, keep an eye out for an email polling you on, David and I have a short list of the next episode that we will do. We're curious to hear your feedback. We'll put a free form field in there, too. And also, we're starting back up with the Zoom calls. So if you want to hang out with David and I on Zoom for an hour, keep an eye out for an email on that, too. If you are an LP, acquired.fm/lp to join. Go check out ACQ2. We have

• 3:24:51David Rosenthal?

  The Deuce.

• 3:24:52Ben Gilbert?

  Seriously, like, the best content that we've had on that feed in a long time coming up. I've been really pumped with the last few episodes and chock full of it even more. So search ACQ2 in the podcast player of your choice. No space. I don't know, we may change that, but as of right now, no space, just like ESPN2 or Muse. And yeah, we're pumped to launch that. Join the Slack. Almost 15,000 folks strong.

• 3:25:18David Rosenthal?

  We just passed 15,000.

• 3:25:19Ben Gilbert?

  15,000 then.

• 3:25:20David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 3:25:20Ben Gilbert?

  Got to update my script. Smart, thoughtful people. Talk about this episode. Get some merch. Acquired.fm/store. Wow, we have like lots of things, David.

• 3:25:28David Rosenthal?

  I know.

• 3:25:28Ben Gilbert?

  We're like a small media empire.

• 3:25:30David Rosenthal?

  The acquired Slack is like our version of Nintendo Power and Powerline.

• 3:25:35Ben Gilbert?

  There we go. We need to produce a Nintendo Power. All right, I'm cutting this off. Listeners, thank you. We'll see you next time.

• 3:25:41David Rosenthal?

  We'll see you next time.