The 10x, 100x Engineer or Game Designer

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In the early days of Silicon Valley, technology engineering was valued for its ability to design systems with the highest amount of functionality. Every chip that you put in there added a whole lot of cost to the bill of materials. And at this point, there's a very little software involved in these games. You're mostly hard-coding the functionality onto the motherboard itself,. depending on what chips you put in.

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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