Is There a Constraint I'm Going to Relax Here?

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The NES won't debut in the US until 1985. And not in Japan until 1983. Yamauchi splits Nintendo's R&D teams from one singular team that's working on all of their video game business into multiple teams. He dedicates them to this home console project and says, "You have years, you don't have unlimited budget"

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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