Nintendo of America

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During the holiday season, it would be like three, four hundred people that they would staff up to handle all the calls. This also tells you about the margins that they were making on the software. At one point, Nintendo America buys a bunch of properties in Hawaii and basically like creates their own internal Like resort for employees. The other half is Nintendo power and it's crazy. There are issues of Nintendo power that sell on eBay today for thousands of dollars.

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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