Nintendo IP

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Super Mario is the best selling franchise of all time. It's beat by Tetris, Pokemon, Call of Duty and GTA in terms of like total franchise copies sold ever. Nintendo has such good owned IP that I think they would be delighted just making the NES and the SNES and the Game Boy. They love making high margin revenue on other developers.

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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