The PPU at the NES is actually doing a lot of work. And it all came about as this necessitated by this constraint that Yamauchi put on the team to make games for less than a hundred bucks. The famous thing that Nintendo also went on to do, and I'm very curious if you know sort of how this came to be, is that their games are optimized for fun, not to show off the hardware.
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!