Nintendo of America Is a Nintendo Signed Cryptographic Game

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It's effectively a Nintendo signed cryptographic thing. Unless you actually go through Nintendo to make sure you get the specific chip with the specific cryptography and put it in the cartridge, it's not going to run on them. Later versions of the Famicom in Japan would also include a lockout chip on them. So they try and retroactively also bring this to the Japanese market. But Nintendo of America is like, obviously a lot of people in the ecosystem are going to hate this.

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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