Donkey Kong

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The game that young Shigeru Miyamoto makes to replace the radar scope software in these cabinets is called Donkey Kong. And Donkey Kong would itself go on turn hundreds of millions of dollars immediately in North America alone. The year that it was released in 1982, it made more money than any film release that year except for E.T. Even more importantly though, I'm so curious what percentage of our audience already knows this and what percentage doesn't.

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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