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Video games are an absolutely enormous industry with a market size of over $100 billion of consumer spend every year. In the early 1980s, the video game industry in the US had some dire straits and nearly evaporated entirely until Nintendo made a huge bet and changed history forever. That is the story we're going to tell today. We're barely leaving it to get to the Super Nintendo.

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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