Game Design - I Can't Give You Engineers

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Yamauchi is so pissed. He can't take anybody off the console project. Those are his best engineers who couldn't maybe pull some rabbit out of the hat here. So he goes to Gumpay and he's like, my dumbass son in law over in America. I got to give him something. Can you give me like a janitor or somebody to like make a game here? And at the time, only engineers made games. Like there was no game designer role. It was just the engineers who made the games. Right. That guy's name is Shigeru Miyamoto. This is how he comes to make his first video game. Yes.

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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