Original subtitles

(pensive music)

[Narrator] In the rural Japanese village of Sonobe,

a boy growing up without a TV

looks for other ways to have fun.

Shigeru Miyamoto spent a lot of his childhood

exploring the woods around his home.

And one of the places that was impactful for him,

was this cave nearby his house.

The cave became this mysterious place.

It scared him.

(tense music)

He eventually manages to find the courage, somehow,

to take that step into the cave.

[Narrator] Young Miyamoto's adventures in this cave

will go on to inspire some of

the most iconic video games of all time.

What if we could make him jump?

He literally invented the title of Game Designer.

It did not exist before Shigeru Miyamoto.

[Narrator] And outside the box visionary-

- Very good.

[Narrator] He'll help grow Nintendo

from a struggling playing card company,

to a multi-billion dollar video game juggernaut.

The combination of Nintendo's ambition

and Miyamoto's creativity,

it's lightning in a bottle.

[Narrator] Alongside engineering wiz Gunpei Yokoi,

they'll put their games in the hands of

nearly a billion people around the world.

I had a Game Boy as a kid.

My mother was really, really into the Game Boy.

Everybody had one.

[Narrator] And inspire a new generation of visionaries.

[Adam] Satoshi Tajiri wants to share

this childlike wonder that he felt collecting bugs.

[Narrator] That nets Nintendo

one of the biggest global brands of all time.

With every single innovation they make,

they put the whole industry on notice.

And that has never been done before.

[Narrator] But back in the early '60s,

Miyamoto is just a boy with a wild imagination.

(cheerful 8-bit music)

I'll save you, princess!

(digital beeping)

[Narrator] Today, Nintendo is known for video games,

but when it was founded in 1889,

they sold a different kind of game.

Nintendo starts out

in basically a pleasure district in Kyoto.

They make cards.

Specifically, Hanafuda decks were their specialty.

Kind of the equivalent of what

a Western playing card deck would be.

And for the first half, maybe, of Nintendo's history,

that was their focus.

[Narrator] Until 1949,

when Hiroshi Yamauchi takes over his family's failing business.

When Yamauchi becomes the president of Nintendo,

he purges Nintendo of all other family members.

[Narrator] Soon after,

he looks for new opportunities to make money.

In the mid-century, like '50s and '60s,

they're kind of trying to figure out what to do,

and so they start doing all kinds of other things.

They have taxis.

It's been a rice company.

Ramen noodles.

They used to have a by-the-hour chain of hotels,

called "Love Hotels,"

so yeah, they did a lot of different things.

[Narrator] But it's an unlikely product

from an unexpected employee

that forever changes Nintendo's focus.

So Gunpei Yokoi was an engineer.

He was hired, essentially,

to maintain the factory equipment.

He was just kind of bored in the office

and tinkering with all the parts that were around,

and he built a prototype of what became the "Ultra Hand."

[Jennifer] And the "Ultra Hand" is like

an extendable claw, we still see them today.

1966, it premiered and it sold 1.2 million units.

It was a phenomenal hit.

It saved Nintendo from from bankruptcy.

(tense music)

[Narrator] By 1977,

Nintendo has a strong foothold in the toy industry

and 24 year old Shigeru Miyamoto wants in.

Miyamoto was a big fan of cartoons and comic books.

[Miyamoto] Yes, I do. I do.

His father does not want

him to become a comic book artist,

so Miyamoto goes to college

to become an industrial designer.

Miyamoto is fresh out of school,

has zero experience,

and he meets an incredibly stern businessman in Yamauchi;

a man who is so cutthroat, he's fired his own family.

Miyamoto shows him these coat hangers that he's made

that are in the shape of animals, for children.

And I am sure he was scared out of his pants.

(tense music)

And Yamauchi not only finds the hangers

incredibly delightful and sweet and whimsical,

he realizes this young man has the ability

to make things that have market appeal.

So Yamauchi hires him, this kid,

basically in a junior role

in their product development department.

[Narrator] Yamauchi knows Nintendo will need

Miyamoto's fresh thinking,

as a new craze takes over the world.

In April of 1978, Taito releases "Space Invaders,"

marking the beginning of

the first golden age of arcade games.

"Space Invaders" changed everything in Japan.

It's so ridiculously successful

that it causes a 100 yen shortage

and they have to start suddenly printing

more money in response to it.

In the early days of Nintendo, in the arcade era,

Nintendo is making knockoff games.

[Game] Trouble, trouble, all fighters line up.

[Narrator] Nintendo's "Radar Scope"

hits arcades in October of 1980.

It's not exactly "Space invaders,"

but it is "Space Invaders."

It had moderate success in Japan,

enough so that they decide to port it to the US.

[Narrator] Yamauchi ships

3,000 "Radar Scope" arcade cabinets

to the newly established Nintendo of America.

But it takes, like, four months

to come from Japan to the United States.

And by that time, the world has moved on.

At this time in 1980,

the video game landscape is dominated

by a little, hungry, yellow creature known as "Pac-Man."

Space-based shooters, out, "Pac-Man Fever," very much in.

(game beeping)

"Radar Scope" fails spectacularly in the US.

And so all of a sudden, they have

over 2,000 unsold cabinets sitting in a warehouse.

This is the death knell to Nintendo of America,

if they can't figure out how to move these cabinets.

There's nothing wrong with it, but they can't sell it.

But can they think about a new way to use it?

Yamauchi comes up with the idea

of essentially creating a new game out of it.

Moshi moshi?

And so what they do, is they open it up

to an internal idea competition

and Shigero Miyamoto steps forward

with the beginning of an idea.

Miyamoto is a big fan of "Popeye;"

Popeye the Sailor.

♪ I'm Popeye the Sailor Man

So at this point, "Popeye" is hugely popular

the world over, especially in Japan.

Years earlier, Nintendo had licensed "Popeye"

in order to make Hanafuda cards.

They already have rights to the "Popeye" image,

so why not use it for the video game?

Miyamoto's reassigned to now take the lead

on this design project.

[Frank] He tells Miyamoto,

you have to build something that works within what we have.

He has no idea what he's doing.

He has never designed a video game before.

His job at Nintendo was essentially

to make artwork decals

for the outside of the coin op cabinets.

[Narrator] To help Miyamoto,

Yamauchi appoints his star engineer, Gunpei Yokoi;

the man behind Nintendo's first handheld:

the "Game & Watch."

The Game & Watch is about the size of a human hand.

It's this little digital screen and it plays one game.

And the reason why the Game & Watch is so brilliant,

is it has provided the foundation

of every piece of Nintendo hardware,

all the way up to the Wii-U.

Yokoi is able to explain to Miyamoto

exactly what hardware specifications are

and how they need to be informing his design choices.

[Narrator] Now, Yokoi and Miyamoto

need to align on a concept.

Miyamoto was really interested

in the kind of narrative potential of games,

which is like a little wild at that point, actually.

In the early '80s,

video games were made by programmers.

And really, it kind of showed

on some of those early games.

[Carly] Early on, a lot of them,

the story is that you shoot something.

That is the story.

And Miyamoto wants to change that.

So Miyamoto starts looking at this cabinet of failures

and thinks, okay, I'm gonna tell a story using "Popeye."

So there's a Popeye cartoon called, "A Dream, Walking"

and if you watch it,

Olive Oyl is sleepwalking

and she's walking up girders in a construction site.

So they make the goal of this game climbing a skyscraper.

[Narrator] But the game cabinet's technology is limited.

Miyamoto really wanted the screen to scroll,

but "Radar Scope" doesn't have scrolling capability.

[Miyamoto] So what I think is really important,

is that we get the story through.

[Yokoi] He climbs.

- He climbs. - He climbs!

So Miyamoto goes to this drawing board

and starts imagining this vertical narrative.

[Yokoi] And so, each level doesn't need

to be the same as before.

Exactly.

In order to get the sense of movement

and to get the sense of drama,

what you had was the character moving upwards.

(speaking Japanese)

[Sam] And then, rinse and repeat next level.

[Narrator] Yokoi and Miyamoto continue to work

diligently for almost two months.

They've got the game design approved.

They've started actually coding the process.

They've started the character designs.

They're trying to get the rights the entire time.

The drawing's great, but we don't have the rights.

It turns out, Nintendo only had the rights

to use Popeye on the playing cards.

And all the hard work they've done for two months?

Down the drain.

(intense music)

[Narrator] After losing the rights to Popeye,

Miyamoto works around the clock

to salvage the game and his story.

If you lose the rights to Popeye,

suddenly your main person can't be a sailor

and you have to come up with a new villain,

but you have a setting, right?

You're at a construction site.

And so they start trying to think about

who else could move through this?

There's not an overarching plot to Popeye,

but there is, essentially, a love triangle.

Popeye is interested in Olive Oyl,

Olive Oyl is also being courted by Bluto.

This is a story about a carpenter;

a carpenter whose angry pet gorilla

steals his girlfriend, and he must get her back.

And that love triangle is what's going to create

the drama in the story that Miyamoto wants

to bring to the arcade game.

And this is often considered the first arcade game

with a wholly encompassed narrative.

[Narrator] To name his new villain,

Miyamoto turns to a thesaurus.

[Jennifer] "Donkey" is used in Japanese quite often

to give a sense of stubbornness.

And then, obviously he wants to find

another way to say "Gorilla."

Well, Kong has lots of cultural touchstones,

so he takes "stubborn gorilla"

and turns it into "Donkey Kong."

[Narrator] With a new story in place,

the two men must figure out

how to reuse everything they can

from their 2,000 unsold arcade games.

So if you're replacing a game in an arcade cabinet,

you don't have to throw away the entire cabinet.

There's a lot of pieces you can reuse.

You can reuse the actual cabinet itself,

control panel, the joystick, the buttons.

We'll move him with this.

But what do we do with this?

If there's a button on the cabinet,

it needs to do something

and it needs to do something that matters.

A good game should ask people to do two things:

each easy on their own but difficult to do together.

He's able to impress upon him

the principle of simplicity in game design.

Their video game hero is going to do something

for the first time.

It will be something people haven't seen.

What if we could make him jump?

It's easy to jump over a barrel.

It's easy to climb a ladder.

It's a lot harder to climb a ladder

while you're jumping over a barrel.

And Miyamoto knows that the ability

to make your hero jump is such a big deal,

he decides to call his character "Jumpman."

"Woo!" Right?

[Narrator] Nintendo finally releases "Donkey Kong"

in July 1981, to arcades throughout the United States.

They're hopeful that it's gonna sell enough units

to keep Nintendo of America afloat.

I don't know that Nintendo

really necessarily had high hopes for "Donkey Kong,"

other than don't lose money.

[Jennifer] They're not sure

it's gonna play in the US market.

They just need to sell these 2,000 cabinet games.

They sell 60,000 games in 1981 alone.

It's a ridiculous success.

I think everyone was kind of caught off guard,

and suddenly they found themselves scrambling

to keep up with demand.

So Miyamoto goes from being this nobody at Nintendo

to all of a sudden being the designer

of their top performing game, ever.

[Narrator] But Yamauchi doesn't want

a one trick gorilla.

He tasks his dream team with making an all new game,

starring Miyamoto's hero, "Jumpman."

Miyamoto and Yokoi now have

this runaway phenomenal success in "Donkey Kong."

And so they know that everything that they're gonna do,

from here on out,

is gonna be measured against that success.

And the pressure was immense.

[Narrator] While Miyamoto racks his brain

to come up with a new story for Jumpman,

Yamauchi asks Yokoi to turn "Donkey Kong"

into a Game & Watch.

The challenge with the "Donkey Kong" game

is that it was designed around a joystick

and the Game & Watches were not using joysticks.

And the way that one would move left and right,

was just a big left and right button.

Never before had someone had to figure out

how does one move in four directions on a handheld device.

So what Yokoi comes up with,

is what we now call the "D-pad," the Directional Pad.

The D-pad is this remarkable example

of form and function marrying perfectly together.

Every gamer can look at a D-pad and figure out,

you move it up, the character moves up on the screen.

You move it down, the character moves down,

and left and right.

The D-Pad is arguably one of

the most influential hardware contributions

to the video game industry.

[Narrator] Meanwhile, to get his creative juices flowing,

Miyamoto needs a change of scenery.

Miyamoto is out taking a walk in Kyoto,

looking for inspiration,

and he sees a bunch of pipes going into the ground.

And I don't think a lot of people

would look at sewage pipes and go,

oh, that looks fun, let's explore that!

But that's why we didn't change gaming as we know it.

At that point, they realized

it doesn't make sense for him to be a carpenter,

because why is a carpenter in the pipes?

And so they decide that he's a plumber.

- [Narrator] And Miyamoto's hero gets a new name: Mario.

The name actually comes from the landlord

of Nintendo's warehouse, Mario Segale.

So there's a real person who Mario was named after.

[Narrator] He also gets a sidekick.

He introduces a brother.

And so, all of a sudden,

we get the birth of Mario and Luigi.

[Narrator] Once again, the advice of Miyamoto's mentor

changes the future of gaming.

It's Yokoi who convinces Miyamoto

to let the character jump higher

than we think Mario should be able to jump.

And that fidelity to real life

doesn't translate into good gameplay.

So in June of 1983, Mario and Luigi,

resplendent in their iconic red and green,

are released into arcades and they are called:

"Mario Brothers!"

Oh, did you think I was gonna say super?

[Narrator] But this will be

the last collaboration of Yamauchi's dynamic duo.

It's now time for Miyamoto to sink or swim on his own.

[Narrator] While Nintendo has focused

on arcade games in the early '80s,

America's home console market has taken off.

In 1977, Atari put out the "Atari 2600"

and Magnavox had the "Odyssey."

Then there was Intellivision, ColecoVision.

Nintendo must have felt like,

"Oh, we're late to the game here,"

and like they're kind of running to play catch up.

Yamauchi sees the Atari VCS console

selling bucket loads in the US,

and he decides: Nintendo should be in that market as well.

[Narrator] But his timing couldn't be worse.

The console business is on fire and not in a good way,

but like in a dumpster fire kind of way.

The market is just flooded with

all these inferior products.

People, essentially, are done with video games.

[Narrator] Despite the decline,

Yamauchi stays the course.

Nintendo releases their own 8-bit arcade system in Japan,

and it's called the "FamiCom," short for "Family Computer."

It's got much better graphics, much better sound,

and Nintendo decides, well,

we should take this to America too.

[Narrator] To find the perfect game for his new system,

Yamauchi turns to Miyamoto.

Miyamoto has decided he doesn't just want

to make a single screen game

like he's been making before with "Donkey Kong."

He wants to make worlds.

Where the character would move,

and the screen would move with him.

Miyamoto is like, I'm gonna put everything I can into this.

And he's mapping out every level,

by drawing in pencil.

The programmers then have to take

the scribble scrabble of work and tracing paper

and somehow translate that to a functional game.

Miyamoto has this giant vision

for what he can achieve on the FamiCom.

And it's still your boy Mario,

but now he's on a very different level.

(Super Mario Bros theme)

"Super Mario Brothers."

It really just broke through

the borders of your television screen

in a way that was mind bending at the time.

It's the joyous freedom of a side scroller.

It's jumping and swimming and flying and climbing,

and squatting and killing and saving people.

It's a game unlike any other.

A game that, quite simply,

declares that the future of gaming is not in the arcade,

but right in your home.

(victorious music)

"Super Mario Brothers" really changed video games forever.

[Narrator] In October 1985,

the Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES,

is released in select US test markets,

alongside "Super Mario Brothers" and 15 other games.

When "Super Mario Brothers" was packed in with Nintendo,

that was the thing that caused

the sales to go through the roof.

People were convinced that video games were done.

It was just a fad, no one's gonna wanna buy it.

And that was almost the case,

until Super Mario Brothers became

the thing that saved Nintendo,

kind of also saved this industry.

[Narrator] But Yamauchi knows just one great game

won't keep selling consoles.

So he tasks Miyamoto with making another.

Miyamoto seizes on what people are into:

"Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,"

"Raiders of the Lost Ark,"

exploration, good and evil,

really exploring the world around you.

So Miyamoto's developing this concept

of an overhead exploration game,

where you go into dungeons and you look for secrets.

[Narrator] He calls his new adventure game,

"The Legend of Zelda."

"The Legend of Zelda" is his way

of expressing his childhood imagination,

of the secret world that was in the woods beyond his home.

The character of Link is not a superhero.

The character of Link is a boy, is a child.

So we can literally think of this

as the autobiographical game

that he wanted to play as a kid.

(victorious chiming)

It takes 10 hours to beat the game?

"Legend of Zelda" is really, really, really ambitious.

This game is a very different style

from anything that'd been seen on a video game console before.

Most games are single session games,

where you're meant to sit down,

play 'til your character dies,

or try to win it in one go.

Miyamoto is going after a game

that one doesn't necessarily complete in one session.

And how much bigger is it

than anything he's created before?

Well, "Donkey Kong" happened on four screens.

Zelda?

(dramatic music)

128; an entire expansive map

of not only different worlds,

but dungeons in a whole subterranean world below them.

[Narrator] But gameplay on such a large map

needs more processing power than the NES can muster.

So they had to come up with new technology.

This is pretty high risk.

This adds to cost of goods,

it adds to development time,

it adds to all the ways that it could fail.

[Narrator] If Miyamoto can't find a solution,

his new dream game could be

put on the back burner, indefinitely.

(tense music)

[Narrator] After months of development,

Miyamoto's team finally has a breakthrough.

This is where Nintendo invents the MMC1,

or the Multi Memory Controller.

They build a new chip that fits right into the cartridge.

And what it does, is it expands the memory.

Think about that.

You can't make a whole new system,

so what you do, is you give the game

the capability to actually boost the system.

But it does even more than that.

What they came up with,

was the ability to save your progress on a cartridge

by literally including a battery

that kept your memory alive.

"The Legend of Zelda" is really

the first video game that has a save system.

That was revolutionary,

because Miyamoto got it in his head

that maybe video games should be something truly epic.

(digital beeping)

You turned it off, you turned it back on,

and Link was exactly where you left him.

[Narrator] But with one problem solved, another arises.

When Nintendo puts Zelda in front of a focus group,

it's a shock.

The testers didn't know what to do.

They froze because they had never been

given this much choice before.

The "Super Mario Brothers,"

it was just a very clear trajectory: go right.

"Legend of Zelda" doesn't give you that.

It doesn't hold your hand.

It says you're on your own, go adventure.

It's a really a first taste, as a video game culture,

in that open world gameplay concept.

Zelda didn't give them anything

and a lot of them hated it.

Internally at Nintendo, this is kind of a scary moment.

Is our next big game too confusing for players?

Has Miyamoto gone off the deep end?

And Nintendo gets really worried

that they might have a failure here.

[Narrator] Meanwhile,

Miyamoto's old mentor Gunpei Yokoi

is hard at work on a revolutionary new console.

Yokoi has it in his mind

that it would be cool to make, essentially,

a portable FamiCom.

Nintendo knows that Atari's developing in this space,

Sega's developing in this space.

They put Yokoi in charge of this,

because he needs to figure out

how to do this at an affordable rate.

He has a philosophy called,

"the lateral use of withered technology."

When technology gets a bit older,

it's obviously significantly cheaper,

but people are inherently familiar with it.

[Narrator] While Yokoi continues tinkering,

Yamauchi asks Miyamoto to make

some changes to "The Legend of Zelda."

Nintendo bigwigs actually ask Miyamoto

to kind of dumb it down, water it down,

hand hold the player some more.

And Miyamoto says the most hardcore thing

I can ever imagine.

He says, "No, I'll make it harder."

They'll wanna figure it out before their friends do.

They'll talk about it and help each other.

I think he understands that

kids on the playground are gonna be

speaking to each other about

the location of secret items

and about new places that they found on the map.

[Narrator] Released in 1986 in Japan

and 1987 in the United States,

"The Legend of Zelda" is the first standalone NES game

to hit an impressive milestone.

1 million units were sold

on the very first day it was released.

That's mind-boggling.

"Legend of Zelda" came with

the shiny gold foil exterior to it,

that really immediately conveyed to the player,

Oh, this is different.

This is epic.

[Narrator] As Nintendo's sales reach new heights,

Yokoi's handheld console is nearing completion.

He uses the D-pad from the Game & Watch,

he uses the A and B buttons from the gaming console.

"Lateral use of withered technology"

creates something new, something groundbreaking.

[Narrator] Nintendo releases the Game Boy

in the summer of 1989.

People go Game Boy crazy.

There's famously a press photo

of Hillary Clinton playing with a Game Boy.

[Jennifer] Children are playing it,

mothers are playing it, grandparents are playing it.

Everyone owns a Game Boy.

There is also the Game Link cable,

that allows you to plug one Game Boy

into another Game Boy to play head to head.

It was, by miles, the most successful portable system

of its time.

(tense music)

But "Miss Pac-man" is just

- a better game. - No, no.

[Narrator] As Game Boys pop up all over Japan,

its unique Game Link Cable provides a spark of inspiration

for another aspiring video game visionary,

and one of the biggest franchises of all time.

It becomes this licensing phenomenon,

that like you can get Pokemon everything.

It is a success, on a scale that is hard to overstate.

(gentle music)

[Narrator] Much like Miyamoto,

Satoshi Tajiri's path to gaming greatness

begins in the woods.

Satoshi Tajiri grows up in a suburb Tokyo.

When he's growing up, it's still really rural.

Tajiri loves just going out

into the wilderness and exploring.

Tajiri has the nickname "Dr. Bug,"

which tells us a lot about what he's doing as a child.

He's going around and collecting bugs

in order to sumo wrestle them

as children do in Japan;

collecting bugs, battling their bugs against each other,

naming their bugs, having bugs as pets.

You know, one could say

that Tajiri was on a mission to catch 'em all.

[Narrator] As he gets older,

arcades become Tajiri's new playground.

Instead of catching real bugs,

now he's shooting space bugs.

He becomes obsessed with video games.

His grades start slipping.

But in those arcades, he finds a growing community.

[Narrator] In 1983, he turns his new obsession

into Japan's first gaming magazine, called "Game Freak."

He creates his own fan magazine,

prints it out on printer paper and staples it himself,

and sells them, which is kind of cool for a kid

who almost flunked out of school.

(pensive music)

[Narrator] By the time the Game Boy comes out,

Tajiri and his fellow game freaks, Ken Sugimori

and Junichi Masuda, have gone from fans,

to game developers.

They start this company, they're pretty young,

they don't have a lot of resources.

They rent an apartment, the three of them,

and live like a dorm room.

[Narrator] But Tajiri and his friends

have never made an actual game.

They don't know what they're doing.

They need to figure this out.

Tajiri and his team decide to hack into a FamiCom,

like literally deconstruct it,

and start figuring out how this technology works.

This is like, very punk rock, right?

It's like, let's go!

[Narrator] Using homemade machines,

the trio program their first game.

[Sam] They created a game called "Quinty."

It's a darling of designers.

It is not a commercial success.

[Narrator] After the lackluster response,

Tajiri's left wondering what's next.

So he is in the park and he sees a couple of kids

playing with their Game Boys with the link cables.

But when Tajiri sees the link cable,

he sees something completely different.

If you're competing against each other with a link cable,

you're effectively moving

bits of information back and forth.

And if you can do that,

then why can't you share information?

[Friend] Coming?

Oh, yeah.

You think it'd be fun to trade monsters?

[Lukas] And this is kind of a revolutionary idea.

Very much like Miyamoto,

he's convinced that what he loved in his childhood

can manifest as a really kick-ass game.

But you need money and you need technology.

And Game Freak didn't have either one of those things,

but Nintendo is the company that does.

[Narrator] Tajiri approaches Nintendo

and is surprised to learn,

"Quinty" has a very special admirer.

There's one person in particular

who is a fan of this game,

and that is Miyamoto.

(tense music)

[Narrator] With help from Miyamoto,

Tajiri gets a meeting with the big boss.

This is a game about childhood.

What if the magic of insect collecting

could be translated into a game?

But instead of bugs,

you catch creatures.

The game that Tajiri brings to Nintendo,

is called "Capsule Monsters."

That a kid who goes off into the world

to capture these mythical beings,

train them up to fight other mythical beings,

and trade them with other people.

[Yamauchi] No.

(tense music)

Thank you for listening.

[Carly] Yamauchi, he doesn't get it.

It doesn't make sense to him.

Miyamoto gets it, but you need everyone to buy-in.

Sir, with all due respect:

I think we should really reconsider this.

[Lukas] Miyamoto really believes in the potential

of this use of the Game Link with the Game Boy.

He offers advice to them, how they can improve the pitch.

He goes, look,

your mechanics have not been thought out well.

We need a way to think through this as a holistic game

and not just a collecting and trading game.

Very good.

These capsule balls, to throw and capture.

The second time around, Nintendo says...

Okay.

[Tajiri] Arigato! Thank you.

Okay, sure.

[Tajiri] Thank you.

Arigato.

(upbeat rock music)

[Narrator] Nintendo sets a 1991 release

for Tajiri's new game, but on one condition:

Game Freak is going to have to fund this project by itself.

For Tajiri and his crew,

this is a big deal.

And the stakes are high, they're exposed.

If this doesn't go well, this could be very, very bad.

[Jennifer] But up until this moment,

Tajiri's never made a Game Boy game before.

And so Miyamoto is able to connect them with Yokoi,

who helps them with the engineering aspects

that come in here.

(speaking Japanese)

So talk about being lucky.

Instead of saying you're on your own,

they say, go talk to that guy.

The guy who made the thing.

(tense music)

[Narrator] Now, they need to bring

150 original creatures to life,

including one that would become their breakout star.

Pikachu's name is actually very cute.

It's an onomatopoetic beginning

and an onomatopoetic end.

"Pika Pika" meaning sparkly, like from the lightning,

"chu" meaning kiss; Pika-chu.

[Narrator] But after four years of nonstop work

and a few missed deadlines,

the ambitious game is taking its toll on everyone.

By the time 1994 rolls around,

Game Freak is not a very fun place to work at.

[Jennifer] All of the developers are exhausted.

And they're under so much stress making other games,

just in order for the company to survive.

So they quit, programmers walked out.

(intense hip hop music)

And as if that wasn't hard enough,

their servers crash.

And this crash doesn't just eliminate

some of the work,

they lose all of their work.

Gone.

Like, this is the end of "Capsule Monsters."

This has the potential not just to sink the project,

it has the potential to sink the company as we know it.

(dramatic music)

(tense music)

[Narrator] Due to a computer crash,

years of hard work on "Capsule Monsters"

is lost in an instant.

But Masuda, the composer for the game,

has been watching the developers for four years

and he's not willing to give up.

Masuda is not willing to accept

that that data is lost.

And he decides to try and save it.

He's trying to learn the programming language.

The problem was, it was Unix.

And all the instruction manuals are in English.

[Narrator] To save the game,

Masuda learns English to teach himself how to code.

And in perhaps the biggest miracle

of this whole development,

he is actually successful.

"Capsule Monsters" is able to live to see another day.

[Narrator] After five years of development,

Tajiri and company are ready

to show Miyamoto their dream game.

Now with a new name, thanks to a trademark issue.

"Pokemon." Very good.

When Miyamoto sees "Pokemon,"

he just has this light bulb moment.

(dramatic music)

We should split it into two games.

Come out with two versions,

have a slightly different set of monsters

that is unique and exclusive to each,

and all of a sudden you need to talk

and trade with other players to collect them all.

So in Japan, we have our red and green version,

and in the United States, we have our red and blue version.

[Narrator] But by the time Game Freak

is ready to deliver Pokemon,

it might already be too late.

Five years after this project was originally green lit

and the Game Boy is starting to show its age,

it's no longer the new system on the block.

No one's really developing for it anymore.

So, Tajiri thinks it's going to fail.

In fact, his barber tells him it's going to fail.

But while sales are flagging on Game Boy,

everyone still owns a Game Boy.

Which means there's a lot of potential customers

that don't have to go buy a console.

So all you need to be able to play this thing

is the game itself.

[Narrator] Nintendo unleashes a multimedia assault

to drive up interest in the game.

We have manga, we have anime, we have a card game.

OLM Inc. is in charge of bringing

Pokemon to life in this anime,

and they're the ones that bring to the table

this idea of making Ash and Pikachu

the main characters of their show.

[Narrator] Released in the US on September 30th, 1998,

"Pokemon" is a huge hit.

In less than a month,

both versions sell more than 400,000 copies.

It turns out that people loved it

and that gives the Game Boy another lease on life.

Between the two different versions of the game,

"Pokemon" made something like $75 million

in the first six months.

[Sam] So it becomes a cash cow. It becomes huge.

And to date, the Pokemon brand has made 92 billion.

That's with a B, dollars.

[Sam] Pokemon did capture that sort of

sense of childhood wonder.

And much like Miyamoto's Link

is sort of autobiographical,

Ash is sort of autobiographical too.

Almost everything that Nintendo is today

comes from the philosophies of both Yokoi and Miyamoto.

Yokoi himself left Nintendo,

but his philosophy never left the company.

Miyamoto was not an engineer,

he wasn't a computer scientist.

He was an artist who worked in tandem with an engineer

to fundamentally change how video games are made.

He really is one of the first people

to be known as a game designer,

outside of the confines of the industry.

That alone is enough to secure him in the history books.

Miyamoto really transformed Nintendo as a company.

And I think, in a way, Tajiri's experience,

Miyamoto's experience, even Yokoi's experience,

is an experience of being the outsider,

finding their place.

When you find out where you fit, that's magic.

Very good.

Very good.