The Toy Industry Is Not New

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Atari made so many of these ET games that they jointly developed with Universal. Steven Spielberg himself was involved in approving the concept of, yes, let's turn ET into a game. They didn't want people discovering the buried games and then reselling them for cheap. This is just how the toy industry works. You make as much money out of it as you can before the fad the kids move on or generation changes.

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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