The Home Video Game Industry Is Just Decimated

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The home video game console market in 1982 by 1985 would be worth $100 million. That's a reduction of 32x in the market size because the entire category just went away. A 97% drop in market size within two years. So everybody who came into this industry, the third party independent software game developers, Atari, Warner Brothers, Mattel, they just lose their shirts.

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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