Original subtitles

[uplifting music]

id

- Hmm?

- Um--yeah.

Would probably guess maybe 20 years.

- 20 or 30, yeah.

- This is so cool you're doing this.

- Are you having fun?

- | bet you guys don't remember

the old Nintendo stuff, do you?

- No, | just have some. | don't--

| was never into collecting for collector's sake, yeah.

- This is the machine that | did "Earthworm Jim" on,

"Cool Spot"--a lot of those games from the early '90s.

But, yeah, you--

see, the big deal, why these are so rare

is because you were supposed to give them back to Nintendo

once you were done with them.

So now here | am getting myself in trouble,

but, you know, try to take it from me, Nintendo.

Come on! Fight me!

[laughs]

- You know, I've been asked a million times

to do these things, and you're the second person

| was willing to it do with.

- Well, it's just Nintendo has lots of

secret ways we do things.

- Yes. - Yes.

[indistinct chatter]

- This is a mushroom, right?

Um...

[laughs]

See, Mario's just a little guy.

He's like, "Excuse me, can | have that mushroom

so | can be a big boy?" And then he's like...

[gulps] and then he's like,

"Bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop,"

and he becomes big, big boy Mario.

He's cute. He's a little cutie.

A little pinch-your-cheek cutie, here he is.

- When you think of video games...

The very first thing that comes to your mind

is Nintendo.

id

- What's the secret to success?

A bit of luck? Maybe.

Being prepared? Sure.

Getting your big break? Why not?

- Here we go!

- Some would say success is about perseverance.

Others, it's about overcoming obstacles.

Others still might say success is about finding

and delivering something unique

and of lasting value,

something the world doesn't know it needs

until it does.

id

But this isn't a story about mere success.

This is a story about ambition,

competition, standing your ground,

and letting the best ideas win.

- Whoo-hoo!

[dramatic music]

id

id

- It may be the most addictive toy in history,

and it's definitely the hottest thing this Christmas:

Nintendo video games.

- This is the Nintendo Switch. - Wii U.

- Nintendo 3DS. - The Wii.

- "Wii Sports." - The DS.

- Loved the GameCube.

- "Smash Brothers." - Nintendo 64.

- "Super Mario 64." - Super Nintendo.

- Game Boy. - | liked the Game Boy.

- Loved Mario. - "It's-a-me!"

- The NES. - Famicom.

- Power Glove. - "Duck Hunt" and "Tetris."

- "The Legend of Zelda." - "Donkey Kong."

- The game in one. - Game in one.

- Nintendo. - Nintendo.

- Nintendo. - Nintendo.

id

- Yes.

- [whistles] - [whistles softly]

When's the first time | played a Nintendo?

That's weird, no one's ever asked me that before.

[playful synth music]

id

| first played Nintendo probably around five years old.

- 1987 on a school bus.

Someone in my class had gotten an NES,

and they brought the box.

- | had to play all of my early games

on an old black-and-white television,

and what | would do in the wee hours of the morning

is play games like "Goonies II"

- Watching and yelling at the screen.

"No, it's right there! Oh, don't miss it!"

- Christmas, when | was eight years old

ripping open the packaging. "Ah!"

- Nintendo. Now you're playing with power.

- | was contacted by a recruiting company

that there was a company, Nintendo,

that was looking for someone fo start

the consumer products division.

They did mention a possible video game product

in the future.

- A college friend of mine, Don James,

had taken a job working at this arcade game company.

- | had an old boss call me

and tell me she was working at the "Donkey Kong" company,

and she asked me if | would come join her,

so | interviewed with Ron Judy.

- And then we were waiting for our next new game

coming from Nintendo,

and one late afternoon, it arrives,

and here we have this game called "Donkey Kong."

- | got this call from a recruiter,

said there's a company called Nintendo

that wants to hire someone

completely outside the business.

And that was definitely me.

- Who are the Mario Brothers? - | don't know.

- The hockey players?

- All | can think of is the guy in the library, Mario Puzo.

- | had heard of it when they started

in the Japanese market with, essentially,

what | considered a copy of my game, "Breakout."

And that was kind of all of a sudden

on my radar screen as a potential competitor.

- Nintendo controlled the market,

and they had a monopoly. | mean, it's plain and simple.

- In six years, the price hasn't gone down at all.

There's no reason for them to.

There's no competition for them.

There is absolutely no evidence that I'm aware of

that Nintendo has kept

any of these other companies out of the marketplace.

- He was offended by us making fun of Nintendo in advertising.

- J Genesis does... f - What Nintendon'tt.

- We had better graphics. Just more fun to play.

- We never had a good relationship at all.

- They were a little bit drunk on their own success.

- They come, they try,

they like, and they buy, and it's a fun business.

- It's not an easy business.

A couple missteps, and it can really create

financial turmoil for a company.

- This is gonna be controversial,

and I'll get hate mail for this,

but you want the truth? I'll give you the truth.

[dramatic music]

id

- So it begins,

well, at the beginning.

[bell rings]

id

[bell rings]

[plaintive music]

id

- So Nintendo started back in the 1880s

as a trading card company.

- People think of Nintendo in terms of the arcade games,

the Super Nintendo, the Wii, et cetera, et cetera.

But Nintendo started out making hanafuda cards,

little playing cards.

- So they were in the gaming business way before

we probably ever even called it the gaming business.

id

- In the fall of 1889,

amongst harsh gambling prohibition laws

in a then feudal Japan,

a young Japanese businessman saw an opportunity.

If American playing cards

couldn't be imported from the West,

maybe he could make a new type of card to sell,

a deck of cards that was legal,

people could collect, play games with,

and, yes, maybe even gamble with.

So instead of jack, queen, king,

it was now tulips, violets, and cherry blossoms.

- The founder's name was Fusajiro Yamauchi.

He had actually worked for a company that did cement,

that did, like, construction around Japan,

and he was actually-- he was running this company.

Weird thing: Fusajiro Yamauchi,

his name was actually not originally Yamauchi.

He was adopted by the guy named Yamauchi

who ran this construction company

because it's very important that family businesses

are passed down from father to son.

And, if no son exists, a man will adopt his employee,

and the employee will take the family name.

He decided he wanted to start

a hanafuda playing card company,

which he called Nintendo.

id

But in 1889, in Japan,

there were pretty significant laws about the importing

of any kind of Western products whatsoever.

And, in fact, playing cards,

which were defined as cards

with card suits and numbers on them,

were outlawed because they were considered

to be a gambling tool.

And, in fact, they were.

id

Japan basically made up its own kind of playing cards,

and it did not use card suits, and it did not use numbers.

It used pictures of the seasons, flowers.

In that way, they got around the regulations

about playing cards.

- They made them for casinos,

and just as like casinos in Las Vegas now

will destroy the decks of cards when they're done with them,

they did the same thing back in the Imperial Japan days.

So casinos needed a lot of playing cards.

That's when Nintendo came in.

[indistinct chatter]

- Mm-hmm.

- Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. - Yeah.

- Okay, so yeah. How do we want to do this?

- So let's have you start here and...

- Facing out this way, I'm guessing?

- Yeah. - Yeah, yeah.

So these are the oldest hanafuda cards | have.

So this was the original brand, Daitouryou, or President.

And so this is the same package artwork

that would have appeared on the very first hanafuda cards.

They did not really change that package artwork a lot.

And these are actually still made out of paper.

And you can see that they're kind of--

they've-- these were played with.

Somebody played with these games a lot,

and they're really deteriorating.

- Oh, yeah, yeah. Hanafuda are very small.

- Oh, no, they're tiny. - Yeah.

- | have one that's really pretty.

It's got sparkles, and it's a flower.

| turned it into a pin.

It's pretty cool. - Nice.

- So, yeah, this is-- if you buy this today,

the cards themselves, as you Can see,

are just made of plastic.

And so you can actually go to convenience stores

in Japan today, right now,

and you can buy Nintendo hanafuda.

[serene music]

- Yamauchi's new hanafuda cards were a hit.

And with that, his new company was born.

id

- "Nin" means luck.

id

"Ten" means heaven.

id

And "do" is, like, a hall or a gathering place.

So this was the Nin-ten-place, or the luck-heaven-place.

You know, and when you go in and you start gambling,

and you Start giving your money away,

you're risking your luck,

the place where you risk your money

and leave it up to heaven.

id

For along time, Nintendo just made hanafuda cards.

Eventually, a lot of the rules

around Western-style playing cards were relaxed,

and so Nintendo starts making

Western-style playing cards as well.

[serene music]

id

And things start to change when the third generation

of Yamauchi comes in.

That's Hiroshi Yamauchi.

[indistinct chatter in Japanese]

- A short time ago,

an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima.

[tense music]

id

- Hiroshi Yamauchi

was a survivor of World War II,

and, like a lot of World War II survivors,

it hardened him a little bit.

- Yamauchi was a famously tough boss...

- Who had to run the family business at a very young age.

- 22 years old.

- He ran it as well as he could,

but he wasn't the world's nicest person to be around.

- One of his first acts inside the company

was to fire his relatives

because he wanted it to be very clear

that he was the one that was in charge.

And he starts looking at,

"Well, how do we start to expand this company?"

[quirky music]

- Young Men trump for you!

- Young Men trump!

[cheerful music]

- After six decades of making playing cards in Japan,

Yamauchi knew it was time to grow or die.

id

So he took a trip west with the hopes of expanding

Nintendo's playing cards into new markets.

When he arrived at the United States Playing Card Company,

the dominant playing card manufacturer in America,

and saw their meager Offices, it struck a nerve.

He realized then and there

that the playing card business had limited potential,

and knew if he was going to grow his family's business,

he'd have to get creative.

[bright music]

id

id

- We know what our goals are.

We know what we hope to accomplish,

and believe me, this is just the beginning.

- After the runaway success

of the Disney-themed trading cards,

Nintendo found themselves sitting on a pile of cash.

[bell ringing]

And the ambitious young Yamauchi

took some of that new money and started trying out,

well, other things,

like Nintendo taxis.

[tense music]

Well, that's not working.

How about Nintendo love hotels?

id

No, no, no.

How about the Nintendo TV Network?

Yeah, yeah.

That's gonna be gold.

[static buzzing]

Nope. Okay, I've got it.

Nintendo rice.

Try again.

- None of this stuff works out.

It seems like maybe Nintendo is having some hard times.

There was, like, a workers' strike in the 1960s.

Like, things were kind of bad.

- In the spring of 1966,

Nintendo did what few seasoned companies

ever do successtully: reinvention.

[hopeful music]

id

- What ends up happening is that Nintendo discovers toys.

- They were sending cards into toy stores,

so they had a distribution line to get into toy stores.

[speaking Japanese]

[siren wailing]

- The former trading card company's foray

into this new industry

wasn't the result of strategic planning.

Rather, it was a mistake that started with one man.

- There was a guy who was working

basically as a mechanic on the line.

[upbeat rock music]

Gunpei Yokoi.

id

A longtime employee,

he worked at one of Nintendo's hanafuda factories

as a maintenance man for the card machines.

During his free time, he tinkered with spare parts,

and one day stumbled onto something unexpected.

- In his spare time,

he was sort of making, like, a grabby hand toy

that you could use it to grab something from far away.

Yamauchi apparently saw this, and was like,

"This is a product--

we're gonna make this into a product,"

and released this as the Ultra Hand,

and it was a huge hit.

id

- So it's got a weird weighted bit here.

And look--look at that. Whee!

[laughs] Whoo!

- After the success of the Ultra Hand,

Yokoi was promoted from maintenance engineer

to the new Nintendo games department

with a single mandate:

create more new hit toys for Nintendo.

- They made other things, like little funny puzzles.

- Nintendo roulette.

This is something you might've bought

in a Las Vegas casino to take home with you.

- Ultra Scope--about the same lineage as the Ultra Hand.

Now this is pretty damn cool.

- [vocalizing]

- A bit slow, but it's getting there.

- The Slugger Mate.

In Japan, this was called the Ultra Machine.

- They liked the word "ultra."

- They did. - Very mechanical.

There's a little bit going on with some wires in there,

but this is a simple piece of electronics here.

- It's still going. Look.

id

You get some extension on that, don't you?

- [speaking Japanese]

- This is postwar Japan.

There's not a whole lot of money

in the pockets of the average consumer,

so it's about trying to make something fun and exciting for people

that doesn't cost a lot of money.

- So | think of Nintendo as an entertainment company.

- That's what Nintendo's always been very clever with,

is understanding the right way to market their products.

- That extends out.

Actually has the Nintendo logo right there on the bat as well.

So even kids in the '60s saw that familiar Nintendo logo.

id

- By the late 1960s,

a deep sense of cultural change

was penetrating the lives of average Japanese people.

The demand for the new and novel

was at an all-time high.

- And once they were making toys,

it eventually moved into electronics toys.

- Another one that they come up with is called the Love Tester.

This is another big hit.

- J Tester, tester, Love Tester

- Love Tester.

-A man holds one end,

and his girlfriend holds the other end.

Then they hold hands with their opposite hands,

and then the Love Tester will read,

you know, whatever amount of electrical current

is passing through that loop at that point.

- J Tester, tester f

- And then that would purportedly show

how in love they are.

- [singing in Japanese]

id

- And so now Nintendo is kind of getting known

for maybe even, like, high-tech electronic toys.

[adventurous music]

id

- So everybody knows "Duck Hunt."

What most people don't know is that "Duck Hunt"

is actually based on a toy that Nintendo made.

So this is a projector,

and it will actually project silhouettes

of ducks onto your wall,

and you shoot the ducks.

And this all came about because of a partnership

with the company Sharp.

There was an engineer there named Masayuki Uemura

who was basically working on this cool thing

with light-sensitive cells.

Uemura starts talking with Gunpei Yokoi about this,

and they kind of develop this idea for a gun.

It shoots a beam of light, and the toy can sense it.

And so they start doing this in many different iterations.

There's a game where you could shoot

at a plastic figure of a cowboy,

or there's a gun where you could shoot at a lion,

and if you hit him right in the mouth, he would roar.

id

[suspenseful music]

- After the eyes flash on the screen, shoot!

Put your pistol in the holster,

and prepare to draw.

id

- In fact, | think | even played--

| forget what it was called,

but it was a play shooting game

that was projected on a screen.

id

| didn't know it was Nintendo, of course, at the time.

- And then, when video games became big,

they thought, "Well, this is the next logical step for us."

- After the eyes flash on the screen, shoot!

[indistinct electronic voices]

- [indistinct].

This is my Nintendo stuff.

We've got a Famicom, Super Famicom Disk System.

Over here, although it's not from Nintendo,

this is the Brown Box, which--

the prototype for the first video game console.

- After a decade of nuclear families

and racing to space...

- Two years ago, all of humanity watched...

- At the dawn of the 1970s...

- Did he fire six shots or only five?

- American ingenuity yielded a first-of-its-kind device

from a resourceful engineer turned inventor

named Ralph Baer.

[delicate music]

id

- Ralph Baer was one of the first television engineers

in the country,

and he always had the idea to make TVs interactive.

Ralph worked for a government defense contractor

up in New Hampshire,

and he proposed his idea for this video game to them.

They had seven prototypes.

The seventh prototype was Called the Brown Box.

The original Brown Box is in the Smithsonian

behind closed doors.

Ralph Baer had made about two dozen of these reproductions

for other museums around the world to show off,

and this one is the first of the reproductions.

Then they had to find a company who would distribute it,

so they went to TV manufacturers.

So Magnavox repackaged the Brown Box

into what they called the Odyssey.

id

- Magnavox presents Odyssey,

the electronic game of the future.

Odyssey easily attaches to any brand TV,

black-and-white or color,

to create a closed-circuit electronic playground.

Odyssey gives you all the exciting action of hockey

and 11 other challenging play and learning games

for the entire family.

[light music]

id

Odyssey, a new dimension for your television,

now at your Magnavox dealer.

He's listed in the Yellow Pages.

- Ralph Baer also invented a light gun.

- One of several optional games,

which include a special shooting gallery

complete with gun and four target overlays.

- But Magnavox was not a toy maker.

They needed somebody to manufacture the light guns.

So there was a company in Japan

that made toy light guns,

and that was Nintendo's first foray

into the video game market.

[ambient music]

id

So these are the light guns

that were manufactured by Nintendo.

This was Nintendo's light gun

that it marketed on its own in 1970 in Japan.

This is the light gun that they made for Magnavox in 1972.

Aside for the cable that goes into the console,

they're basically identical.

And also as a result of this, Nintendo had the rights

to import the Odyssey into Japan.

- It is only natural that Nintendo

would look at video games,

like, "Pong" style dedicated machines--

would look at that and say, "Well--you know, great.

We should be doing that as well."

[gentle music]

So Nintendo simply licenses previously-existing

Odyssey machines from Magnavox in the U.S.

and then puts those out in Japan

under its own brand name.

And so, in 1977, Nintendo puts out the Color TV-Game 15

and the Color TV-Game 6.

id

- [speaking Japanese]

- And so the controllers come out.

It's hardwired and attached here.

You can take the controllers out.

| mean, everything is literally just controlled with this.

- Just like "Pong," you didn't have cartridges.

It was just hooked up to a TV set.

- And this is how you would select the different games.

Yeesh! [laughs]

It always scares me to sort of move some of these switches around.

id

- The rebranded Color TV-Game series of systems

from Nintendo was a precursor

of even bigger things to come from America.

[dramatic music]

- There's only one conclusion you can come to--television.

- "Pac-Man." - f Play Atari today J

- For hours, and play [indistinct]...

- Psychologists remind us every younger generation

has to have something to scare adults.

Right now, all of this is certainly it.

id

- The centipedes are coming! Get your fingers moving fast!

[all chanting indistinctly]

- Zapping those little devils from outer space.

- [speaking Japanese]

- For me, some of the nostalgia of the 2600

and remembering getting that Atari in my house the first time

and thinking that, you know, | might never leave the house.

| literally remember that as a child,

getting an Atari and thinking,

"| might never leave the house again.

I'm just gonna play these games the rest of my life."

And then that kind of wanes, but when it comes back,

all of the memories about it are positive.

| mean, and you're a dot, right?

And | remember picking up the bridge in "Adventure"

and finding the secret where you can go

and find the kind of back door in the game.

Having these duck things chase you

that were supposed to be, what,

dragons or something, that they were--yeah.

| mean, you were making up so much of it.

- Well, our guest this afternoon has been called

the P.T. Barnum of Silicon Valley and widely acknowledged

as the father of the video game industry.

He created "Pong" and 35 other video games

while chairman of Atari.

Creative genius, Nolan Bushnell.

- When you invented your first video game,

did you have any idea

that it would take off,

| mean, do what it's done today?

- Yes, | did, but | didn't think

it would do it quite as quickly.

[laughter]

- Probably | had heard of it

when they started

in the Japanese market with, essentially,

what | considered a copy of my game, "Breakout."

- You can't keep me in here, Atari.

[game beeping]

- And that was kind of all of a sudden

on my radar screen as a potential competitor.

- [speaking Japanese]

- There was this interesting thing that happened in Japan

that "Pong" was not a big deal there.

A two-player game worked in America.

It didn't work in Japan,

and, therefore, "Breakout" became the icebreaker,

the "Pong" of Japan...

[suspenseful music]

You learn after a while that business

is a rough-and-tumble thing, and you get copied.

Patents have not really caught up to gameplay,

and so it was always fair game.

[dramatic music]

- If you look at the early Nintendo games,

it's a lot of copies.

You know, there's games like "Space Firebird"

and things like that that are pretty much

just straight-up copies of other games

that were out there at the time.

id

- Yamauchi saw the writing on the wall

and knew the success of arcade games

and home video game systems was only the beginning.

From "Pac-Man" to "Galaga" to a dozen others,

every arcade game seemed

to virtually print money or coins.

With a worldwide arcade boom,

his dream of growing the family business

beyond the borders of Japan

seemed more feasible now than ever,

so he set his sights on the American market.

But who to run it? Who could he trust?

[gentle music]

id

When his father-in-law presented him

with an opportunity to start a new division

of the family company in America,

the then 34-year-old Minoru Arakawa

saw little reason to accept.

His wife, Yoko Yamauchi, fiercely opposed the offer

knowing what her father had sacrificed for the company.

Recent transplants to Canada from their native Japan,

the Arakawas were keen on making a new life

and a new way for themselves a little north of America.

id

Despite Yoko's misgivings about her father

and Minoru's own uncertainty,

they couldn't ignore the raw potential of the opportunity.

So, after months of deliberation

and more than a little pressure

from Father Yamauchi, Minoru said yes.

At the turn of a new decade, Minoru and his wife, Yoko,

packed up their two daughters

and made the move from Vancouver, Canada,

to the Big Apple.

[dynamic music]

id

- Mount St. Helens has erupted.

- Initial reports say

that a large mushroom-shaped cloud

has risen almost ten miles into the sky.

Pilots flying over the volcano

said the eruption looked like an atomic bomb.

[melancholy music]

id

- You know, there's a kind of a standard formula

followed by a lot of Japanese companies

and other Asian companies that are doing business in America.

And that is that they have

a certain number of the Japanese executives,

in this case, that will come to America and be based here.

Mr. Arakawa married the daughter of Yamauchi-san,

the CEO of Nintendo,

so these guys were pretty well-connected.

But then they hire Americans,

and they want to integrate more into American culture,

and particularly on the sales and marketing side of the organizations.

- Yeah, well it was--it was--

Chase Express was the name of their trucking company.

It was where they set up their Far East Video,

in their warehouse.

But they had reached an exclusive deal with Nintendo

to be the sole importer.

| think they actually had negotiated

the deal directly with Mr. Yamauchi.

What year was it?

[engine turns]

[lively music]

id

- Wow, that would've been around 1980, ‘87,

and Al Stone and ! had a company here in Seattle.

A friend of ours had a relationship with a trading company in Japan,

and they asked us if we wanted to try a Nintendo video game.

And Al and | at the time said, "Sure, we'll buy one."

And we had found a friend who allowed us to put it

in the lobby of his Holiday Inn hotel by the airport,

and three days later, the fellow calls us and said,

"Will you guys come and pick this thing up?

It quit working already." So we head out there,

and we realized that the coin box was full,

and that's why it quit working.

They couldn't put quarters in it anymore.

id

We realized there was something here,

so we contacted the connection to Nintendo

and started buying larger quantities

and selling them through coin-operated game distributors.

- Minoru knew that step one for his new American company

would be a hit game, but what game?

"Space Invaders" had just become a global phenomenon,

Namco's "Galaxian" was a massive SUCCESS,

and "Galaga," also a space shooter,

seemed to be in every arcade in the world.

Back in Japan, Nintendo had been trying

its hand in the arcades as well

with their own string of "Space Invader" clones

and other space shooter games.

But their biggest hit by far was a space shooter

with a twist called "Radar Scope."

[hopeful music]

Yamauchi and Arakawa agreed that this was

their best chance for success in America.

So Nintendo of Japan began manufacturing

3,000 "Radar Scope" cabinets for delivery

in the newly-minted Nintendo of America.

id

New York headquarters, check. Sales and distribution, check.

A hit game from Japan.

[buzzer buzzes]

The hit game wasn't selling.

American bar and arcade owners just didn't see the need

for another "Space Invaders" clone,

which "Radar Scope" certainly was.

To make matters worse,

many people found the game's constant beeping annoying.

[tense music]

Arakawa and his truckers-turned-sales-force

managed to sell 1,000 of the cabinets

through wheeling and dealing.

id

But that left 2,000 more "Radar Scopes"

collecting dust in Nintendo of America's

Hackensack, New Jersey, warehouse.

- "Radar Scope" started to be

referred to as a 90-day wonder.

Initial earnings were extremely good,

but after about 90 days,

it had peaked and was falling fairly quickly.

- | joined Nintendo.

| immediately found out

that "Radar Scope" wasn't doing good.

We had too many of them.

id

- And Arakawa finds himself

with all of these "Radar Scope" machines

that he can't do anything with.

- All the games had to come through the Panama Canal.

By the time the machines got into New Jersey,

the earnings had dropped off,

and so they were stuck with these machines.

That's the main reason why they decided to move back to Seattle

is so that they were within two weeks of Japan.

- So you either keep selling a product

that you know no one wants,

or you literally throw them into the ocean.

There was no third other option,

unless you came up with a game changer of an idea.

[melancholy music]

- With failure looming, Arakawa had a choice.

He could resign preemptively, saving face.

He could blame "Radar Scope's" failure on the U.S. market.

Or maybe there was a third option.

- And so he had to call back and say,

"Listen, | need a new video game.

"You need to take the 'Radar Scope’ hardware.

| just need to put a new game in it."

- But all of Nintendo's existing game designers

were busy making the next year's suite of games,

so they found someone who was working there

as a Staff engineer,

who's basically painting the cabinets,

and said, "Can you make a game because everyone else is busy?"

That guy was Shigeru Miyamoto.

[uplifting music]

id

- [speaking Japanese]

- Hello, I'm Shigeru Miyamoto, game developer at Nintendo.

- Raised by parents who enjoyed the theater and popular culture,

young Miyamoto grew up to become a free spirit.

At a young age, he loved American Westerns,

science fiction movies,

and was obsessed with bluegrass music and the banjo.

His upbringing and personal taste evolved to create

a truly unique and inventive imagination.

After graduating from

the Kanazawa Municipal College of Industrial Arts

with a degree in industrial design,

Shigeru, or Shigi, as his friends called him,

was a bit lost.

He loved manga, or Japanese comics,

but was unsure if he could break in.

- He had worked other arcade games.

He'd done cabinet art and things like that,

and done some graphics,

but Miyamoto had never directed a game.

But anybody else who had ever directed a game

at Nintendo was busy,

so this was Miyamoto's big chance.

"All right, Shigeru Miyamoto, we need you to make a game."

[ambient music]

id

Originally, Miyamoto was gonna make a game about Popeye.

- Good morning, sweetheart.

- The "Popeye" deal fell through,

but that's where Miyamoto kind of started, and he thought,

"Okay, well, we've got this interesting love triangle

between Popeye and Bluto and Olive Oyl."

But the story that Miyamoto kind of came up with was,

"Well, this trainer is kind of mean."

And so Donkey Kong-- he was being mistreated

by this guy who was his trainer.

Then he was just like, "I'm sick of this."

He busts out, he grabs the guy's girlfriend,

and he takes off, you know, up the side of a building.

id

- We were waiting for our next new game from Nintendo,

and couldn't wait for its arrival,

and one late afternoon, it arrives.

And here we have this game called "Donkey Kong."

Al immediately just got up and left

and went to our local restaurant.

- We looked at that name, and then we said,

"Oh, God, how can we sell this?"

- So we asked NCL in Japan,

"Let's change the name to the game.

We think this will be just fine."

- And they responded,

"You can't change the name of the game."

id

- When | started there,

Nintendo was small, five people.

And it was literally Mr. Arakawa, Ron Judy,

Al Stone, Don James, myself, and Jon Pedersen.

And we were the guys who did all of the work

of converting the games over.

- Mr. Arakawa, he'd buy a case of beer,

and several of us and even some

of the employees’ wives would join,

and we'd start converting some of the games

over to "Donkey Kong."

So we'd stay there till probably midnight,

sometimes after,

working on converting machines.

id

[dynamic music]

id

- Here we are out here in the days

of all the space games,

trying to sell our distributors

on a game called "Donkey Kong."

But we did our own testing at a local bar and restaurant

called the Spot Tavern,

and we put in one machine,

and, boy, it outearned all the other games there.

We added a second game.

They were both earning pretty much maximum.

id

We added a third game, and it did the same thing,

and, at that point, we realized

this was definitely a very hot game.

- It's "Donkey Kong," the arcade sensation,

and now you can play it at home.

- "Space Invaders" had been a huge worldwide hit.

"Pac-Man" had been a huge worldwide hit.

"Donkey Kong" now becomes the next big hit.

It is unlike anything anybody has ever seen.

| remember seeing this game.

| mean, you have so many of the arcade games

that are space or a sport,

and then you have this other game with this giant gorilla

with this Italian plumber trying to run up these ramps.

And | remember just thinking like,

"That's kind of bizarre."

- When | first played

the "Donkey Kong" arcade game machine,

| remember it being excruciatingly hard.

- When you first pick up that hammer,

like, you have no concept of the timing on it.

It just disappears when you're about to hit a barrel,

and then you die immediately.

- All the perfect trappings of a great arcade game.

It looked really easy,

but it was challenging and hard,

and if you made a mistake,

you wanted to immediately play again.

- We were all very, very impressed with "Donkey Kong."

- | found it to be addictive, so...

- When you completed the first level,

you got to a whole different screen.

- Back then, they basically made it a second game.

You were playing the sequel alongside the original.

And then level three is different than level two,

and then level four is different than the other ones.

- You have to get good at three different games--

‘cause | never get to the, like, the fourth level

of "Donkey Kong," which is the cement factory.

- All | wanted to do was get to the end

so that | could see what that next change was gonna be,

and everything else didn't matter.

It was, like, just the sort of reveal of what was coming

at the ends of each one of these.

[dramatic music]

id

- There's very few games,

especially in the early '80s like this

in which you control a human being.

Very, very few.

Versus a Spaceship or an abstract shape like "Pac-Man."

This was a guy running around, jumping, climbing, falling.

- The experience was, to me,

a revelation about how strong narrative gameplay could be.

- In most video games,

you put your coin in, and you press start,

and immediately you're playing a game.

That's not the case in "Donkey Kong."

You put your coin in, and you press start,

and you see a little cinematic scene of Donkey Kong

holding Pauline in his arms as he climbs up the ladders,

stomps on the girders, warps them,

and turns them diagonal,

and then places Pauline on her pedestal

when she shouts, "Help, help!"

id

That's way more cut scenes, if you will,

than any arcade or home, like, video game

had had at that point.

This was really using the language of a video game,

not just text, to tell a story.

- Cartoonlike graphics, sort of a fairy tale.

Nothing like that had really been in the arcade before.

- "Donkey Kong" probably made me a gamer.

- The thing about Miyamoto-- and he's talked about this--

is it starts with kind of feeling.

He talks about growing up and so many of his fun times

as a kid have influenced the games that he's built.

And you feel that. They feel very human.

- [speaking Japanese]

- So, when | first played "Donkey Kong,"

| thought, "Can you have a career doing this?

"This is actually a job?

[video game music]

1am so in."

[indistinct chatter]

- Whoo-hoo!

[uneasy music]

id

[video game music playing]

id

- In the early '80s, all the Nintendo games

have these musical chords,

and there's a big speaker

right in the front of the cabinet.

If you're eight, nine, ten years old, it's hitting you right in the chest.

If you're not ten years old in 1982,

| don't know how | can recreate the visceralness

and the revelation of that experience for you.

- Progress!

Oh!

id

Oh!

[ambient music]

id

- What happens when an unstoppable force

comes into contact with an immovable object?

Conflict.

[dramatic music]

id

Sid Sheinberg, the head of Universal Studios at the time,

saw the success of "Donkey Kong"

and couldn't ignore the similarities to Universal's on-screen ape.

When Sheinberg's top lawyer told him how much money

this new "Donkey Kong" company was making off the game,

they both decided it was time to take action

and claim what they believed was theirs.

- Nintendo was embroiled in a lot of lawsuits

in the '80s and early '90s

that it-- that all sort of emerged

from the company's explosive success and popularity.

And Universal looked at the success of "Donkey Kong"

and said, "Hey, you ripped us off."

This is a copy of "King Kong," and we own "King Kong,"

SO YOU Owe US a whole bunch of money.

- So they decided to sue "Donkey Kong" on the basis

that it was too similar to their own property,

"King Kong."

And there is some validity to that claim

because Donkey Kong and King Kong

are both very large gorillas named Kong

who are on the top of buildings,

terrorizing people and holding girls hostage.

- A lot of people speculate

where Mr. Miyamoto got his inspiration,

and | think that he probably did pull a little bit

from "King Kong" for "Donkey Kong,"

certainly the--you know, the femme fatale

being in the hands of the monkey.

- "King Kong" was so world-famous.

| mean, the original movie came out in 1933.

It was one of the most action-packed movies

anybody had ever seen.

You know, he's climbing the building.

He's falling from the building.

There's the girl.

And it's hard to imagine

that he wasn't influenced by that.

- Maybe Miyamoto-san had inspiration

for "Donkey Kong" from "King Kong,"

but--you know, it's all grist for the mill.

You know, when you work in pop culture, video games,

technology, everything you absorb kind of

goes inside your creative mind and gets recycled.

- It's almost like he made King Kong

sort of a more adorable character,

but now you're just gonna beat him with a plumber.

- Universal wanted a piece of the pie,

so in the spring of 1982,

Universal City Studios Incorporated sued Nintendo Company Limited.

They expected an easy win.

id

- When "Donkey Kong" was being sold,

it made $180 million its first year, which is a lot.

And then the second year, it made another $100 million,

which is, again, a lot of money.

So Nintendo is sitting on this throne of money,

and Universal, the film company,

decides, "We wanna get into this business too."

But it's much easier instead of designing

a hit video game and selling it

and then hoping to get another throne of money,

to simply take someone else's throne of money.

id

- It didn't matter what size we were as a company.

It mattered to us that we were Nintendo,

and we had products that were beloved

and that we loved.

And so, when we were gonna legally fight against someone,

it did not matter to us the size of that company,

whether they were small,

or whether they were big, or what it would take.

- Surprising everyone but themselves,

the little company that could stood up to the bully

and scored a victory in court.

A huge one.

- And what ends up coming out is that "King Kong"

had already passed into the public domain.

Universal no longer had

any claim whatsoever to "King Kong."

- The chain of title,

a legal term meaning Universal owns "King Kong,"

did not exist, so the judge found that

Universal knew it did not own the rights of "King Kong"

but tried to sue Nintendo based on its copyright claim.

The judge was not happy about that at all,

threw the case out, and said that

even if they had a valid claim,

"King Kong" could not be copied by "Donkey Kong"

because "Donkey Kong" counts as a parody of "King Kong."

- You know, this was a very long and protracted legal battle,

but Nintendo stood up to this giant, this monolith,

and came out smelling like a rose and won.

[game music]

id

- J Transformers S

- Take a cassette out of its case.

- [screams]

- Personal computers.

- 16 kilo memory goes a long way.

- 24-hour cable news networks.

Music videos.

Magic Johnson versus Larry Bird,

Cabbage Patch Kids, and "We Are the World."

Despite bringing a general sense of abundance,

the 1980s also brought with it something new

to the burgeoning video game industry...

[bright music]

Oversaturation.

[object shatters]

[melancholy music]

id

Game after game didn't deliver anything new.

This resulted in less crowded arcades,

overstocked store shelves,

and American consumers walking away.

- | can remember--

in '83 and '84,

| can remember crying, like, literally crying.

| get goosebumps now even thinking about it

because | thought that video games were over.

- Video games have come on hard times these days

with closeout sales,

discount prices just about everywhere.

Some people are saying that computer games

as a part of the market is kind of dying now.

Do you think that's the case?

- The video game maker says it plans to lay off

about 300 workers.

- The big crash.

Not since 1929 has an industry fallen so far, so fast.

lt was almost like the stock market boom

of the 1920s just before 1929.

[game over music plays]

[dramatic music]

- The crash--I've often said that it was suicide.

It wasn't homicide.

- | had a bad feeling for the video game industry.

| really thought, "Boy, this is dragged down.

The tail-- it could ruin the company."

- The market was just flooded with junk.

- Compared to the games that we were playing in the arcades,

home video games were so bad.

- It was very important in the history of Nintendo

what happened to Atari.

[light tense music]

- There is no one event that triggers this,

but the biggest one, the one that | think everybody,

whether you were alive then or not Knows about

is the dual failures on the Atari

of "Pac-Man" and "E.T." video game.

- You would take some of the finest arcade games,

and they would offer them for the home system,

and they delivered such a poor quality.

"Pac-Man," one of the finest, greatest games in the arcade.

- But if you're a kid in the early '80s,

you wanna play "Pac-Man," and that is not "Pac-Man."

- They had just enough sprites

to barely make the game function.

And, when you're moving him around, if he's going this way,

he would look--his mouth would be oriented correctly,

but, if you moved up, they had to do this,

and when he moved down, they had to do that.

You know, they didn't have the graphic ability to change it.

So that's how limited that machine was.

- "E.T.", the biggest movie since "Star Wars,"

we all love it.

And here comes this "E.T." video game

that we're all super excited about.

My sister and | couldn't believe it, and it is awful.

It is absolute garbage.

Millions of kids around the world

have the exact same experience.

- The product that was delivered by Atari

was so substandard...

[game beeps]

The consumer quit also.

- It was a race to the bottom at that point.

id

- Atari made the mistake of thinking

that a very limited machine

could have a very long shelf life and be really a software platform.

- Like, | expected the 2600 to be phased out

in probably ‘80, '81.

And by pushing it to '83,

it was just nobody home there.

- You can't just assume that every home's gonna get one

and every home's gonna have it for the rest of time.

It's gonna get replaced very quickly

by something more sophisticated.

- There's too many systems. There's too many games.

And, importantly, there's a sense that people are going to start shifting

from video games to personal computers.

- PCjr from IBM,

the computer that's growing by leaps and bounds.

- | think it's probably one of the only times

the market leader abandoned its market.

And Atari essentially did that underwater.

- There was about a year there where a lot of people

thought that video games would never return.

[desolate music]

id

- | think that the legacy position of Atari

is simply, it was a Start.

It's now turned into a T-shirt logo,

and that's about all that people take it serious for.

- Oh, I'm disappointed, but, you know,

| try not to live my life in the rearview mirror.

id

- To the untrained eye, the video game industry

was drawing its last breath in America.

- The tokens eventually run out,

and even the best players must return to the glass towers,

where the games are more complex,

and the scores not so easily kept.

[brisk music]

- What consumers didn't know

was that the "Donkey Kong" company, as they knew it,

was developing a machine that would become

one of the defining objects of the decade.

- There's overwhelming choice for the season's biggest hit,

the Nintendo Entertainment System.

- Nintendo is almost the most fun a kid can have.

- Thousands of calls for players every day.

- Taken America by storm.

id

- We were countersuing Universal for copyright infringements.

At the time, | was considered a copyright expert,

and so | went and testified in that case.

And the funny thing is, is they wanted me to get up

and play "Donkey Kong,"

and, you know, the judge came down off the bench

to watch me play.

| couldn't get through the first level in front of the court.

Mr. Arakawa had to come up and play it

to take them through that.

- | remember so clearly my cousin showing me

this little piece of electronics,

and he was like, "This is 'Donkey Kong Jr.,""

and then showing me a different piece of electronics

and saying, "This is 'Popeye."

Then, because that wasn't enough,

he showed me the DIP switches on the back of the machine

and figured out that we could give ourselves

256 guys on "Popeye,"

which still wasn't enough for me to beat the Sea Hag level.

[dramatic music]

id

- These are extremely hard to find,

and so I'm very, very lucky to have even this one.

And there is the Ultra Hand itself,

still--considering its age, actually in pretty good shape.

- So here's a Color TV-Game, "Blockbuster,"

And this was the first product that Shigeru Miyamoto worked on

when he was working at Nintendo.

It was their third-- third or fourth.

It was a very early dedicated gaming system

that played versions of "Breakout."

So we can see in here-- got it in a bag--

but it's this outer case design here

that was designed by Miyamoto.

And, again, you can see you have these

pictorial images here on the front that let you know

what game you're selecting when you pick one.

And here's the button to serve the ball, nice and big.

But yeah, that is "Blockbuster."

id

- Wasn't Mario called Jumpman? - Jumpman.

- Jumpman. - Jumpman.

- "Jumpman" at the time. - His character always

being, like, the tough, like, little guy

to run around and kind of, like, save the day--

| think that was--it gave him some heart, you know?

People liked that he was going to save--

| guess, in "Donkey Kong" the original,

he was saving his friend, "Pauline,"

or his girlfriend, whatever,

and then it became Princess Peach.

id

- Oh!

[game over music plays]

It's not gonna happen. - Awesome, | think we got it.