TITLE
The Rise of Nintendo: A Story in 8 Bits
AUTHOR
Blake J. Harris
PUBLICATION
Grantland
YEAR
2014
ARTICLE TYPE
Book Excerpt
FROM THE ARTICLE
On September 23, 1889, just weeks before his thirtieth birthday, an entrepreneur named Fusajiro Yamauchi opened a small, rickety-looking shop in the heart of Kyoto. To attract the attention of passing rickshaws and wealthy denizens, he inscribed the name of his new enterprise on the storefront window: Nintendo, which had been selected by combining the kanji characters nin, ten, and do. Taken together, they meant roughly “leave luck to heaven” — though, like most successful entrepreneurs, Yamauchi found success by making his own luck. In an era where most businessmen were content to survive off the modest returns of regional mainstays such as sake, silk, and tea, he decided it was time to try something new. So instead of selling a conventional product, Fusajiro Yamauchi opted for a controversial one, a product that the Japanese government had legalized only five years earlier: playing cards.In the heart of Kyoto, he and a small team of employees crafted paper from the bark of mulberry trees, mixed with soft clay, and then added the hanafuda card designs with inks made from berries and flower petals. Nintendo’s cards, particularly a series called Daitoryo (which featured an outline of Napoleon Bonaparte on the package), became the most successful in all of Kyoto.
After several decades of staggering success, Fusajiro Yamauchi retired in 1929 and was succeeded by his son-in-law Sekiryo Yamauchi, who ran Nintendo efficiently for nineteen years, but in 1948 he had a stroke and was forced to retire. With no male children, he offered Nintendo’s presidency to his grandson, Hiroshi, who was twenty-one and studying law at Waseda University. It didn’t take long for Hiroshi Yamauchi to make his presence known. He fired every manager that had been appointed by his grandfather and replaced them with young go-getters who he believed could usher Nintendo beyond its conservative past.
With innovation on his mind,Yamauchi branched out into a number of other, less lucrative endeavors, including an instant-rice company and a pay-by-the-hour “love hotel.” These disappointments led Yamauchi to the conclusion that Nintendo’s greatest asset was the meticulous distribution system that it had built over decades of selling playing cards. With such an intricate and expansive pipeline already in place, he narrowed his entrepreneurial scope to products that could be sold in toy and department stores and settled upon a new category called “videogames.”
COMPANIES MENTIONED
Nintendo
GAMES MENTIONED
Donkey Kong
PEOPLE MENTIONED
Minoru Arakawa
Sam Borofsky
Ron Judy
Howard Lincoln
Peter Main
Shigeru Miyamoto
Howard Phillips
Al Stone
Gail Tilden
Bill White
Hiroshi Yamauchi
PLATFORMS MENTIONED
Nintendo Entertainment System [NES]
ALTERNATE LINK
Archived Copy @ Internet Archive
EXCERPTED FROM
Console Wars