Nintendo Is Killing Their Dominance

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Nintendo historically hasn't done a great job of leveraging a large install base to advantage them with the next platform. They didn't have backward compatibility at every early generation. The Super Nintendo was not backwards compatible with the NES. The GameCube was not backwardscompatible with the N64. It started even before then.

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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