Game Over: How Nintendo Conquered the World
(David Sheff, 1993)
This is, obviously, a historical work but his point as I’m well past 3/4 and we’re basically getting some talk about Nintendo’s plans for modem-based network features like checking your stocks, getting game tips, and online text-based chart that is totally safe for kids. The Play Station (which begat the Playstation) debacle is discussed in detail, but the ‘good parts’ tended to be the earlier history of Nintendo pre-video games and NES history. This isa generally ‘light’ book about the people and such. Fun read, but very dated. I think the author did a follow-up, but even that only gets us to a round 2000.
If you’re interested in a bit more technical, an earlier book I read that covers the technical wackiness of the NES is I am Error by Nathan Altice. It’s part of a ‘MIT Platform Studies’ series and was a really neat mix of tech talk (but at a level most people here could get, not Electrical Engineer grade tech talk) with some interesting trivia. More focused on the product line than anything else, but discusses the surrounding weirdness.
For those who are interested in the Platform Studies series, I am more critical of Dominic Arsenault’s Super Power, Spoony Bards, and Silverware which covers the SNES era. It’s less technical and more business focused, and I felt like the central thesis of the book was, “Your fond memories of SNES games were a tissue of lies for a system that had a bunch of boring games that weren’t technically innovative.” Also, I’m seeing some disagreement between this and Game Over with the nineties book being pretty clear that Nintendo was pushing restrictions on licensees all through the NES era and if anything loosened up for the SNES era. (Licensees were only allowed to release a set number of titles a year, which was intended to help enforce quality requirements and seen as a way of preventing another bust in the video games market like the one that had just taken down Atari a couple years before the NES launched in the US. Nintendo themselves held to this restriction, in fact, which makes it more interesting where you realize that Nintendo’s generally only released a handful of first party games a year. Several big companies basically created subsidiaries tog et around this restriction.
Game Over has a lot about the legal wrangling and cultural/social impact of 80s games, which is its strong point. Quite a lot about Atari’s repeated efforts to screw ‘competition’ even after they’d exited the market and been sold off for parts.
Bonus is a chapter on Tetris including when the Nintendo big cheeses took the guy who invented Tetris out for sushi and they had to teach him how to eat. He was chided for nibbling and not eating a piece in one bite, which led to him taking in a ball of wasabi in one bite…