The Name of the Game Is the Game

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The one big playbook theme that I want to talk about, Peter Maine, was Nintendo of America's VP of marketing. He codified what ultimately became the company's sort of unofficial slogan besides like, do everything to be a monopoly without using the word monopoly. The phrase he comes up with is, the name of the game is the game. That's very Bernard Arno. It's control more so than economics.

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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