What the Hell Is Side Scrolling Mario?

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Carmack and Romero would then of course go on to create Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake. There is some alternate world where Nintendo could have said yes and those could have been Nintendo games. Like the Atari NES, Doom by Nintendo. The internet being AOL on Atari devices. We're not going to talk about it on this episode, but Netscape being an N64, information super highway based technology platform.

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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