Miyamoto and the Nintendo Philosophy of What Makes for a Great Game Designer

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Miyamoto and his team at Nintendo want to make games that are fun first. They don't need to do any of the other stuff on top of that, they say. It's just so wild that Yamauchi has never played a game in his life - he totally intuitively grasped all these principles.

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!

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