Nintendo of America - The Most Genius Inversion of All Time

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Hacker International is making tons of money selling their own cartridges directly and not paying a dime to Nintendo. And Nintendo meanwhile has drifted like very Disney, very Apple and their family friendliness. So they come up with maybe the most genius inversion of all time. They say we should engineer a lockout chip that you are referring to into the hardware and the software. It's actually unclear to me if that idea came from Japan or from America, but the Japanese engineers implemented it. This is a specific chip in the console that needs to handshake with specific chips in the cartridges for the new systems in America That will block out any not official Nintendo approved cartridges from playing in the console.

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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