How Nintendo Created the First Programmable GPU - 10 Years Before Nvidia

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Nintendo's R&D2 team created a home video game console that was years ahead of the competition and sold for a cheaper price. They achieved this by using cheap, off-the-shelf technology for the CPU and pairing it with a secondary processing unit called the PPU. The PPU was a dedicated chip that processed the graphics output on the television and had specialized circuitry for backgrounds and sprites. This architecture, where the workload was split, was a groundbreaking innovation in the gaming market, as it was a decade before Nvidia invented the GPU. Previous consoles had chips for graphics output, but they were not programmable and did not have onboard memory. This achievement by Nintendo was driven by the constraint of creating a console under $100, showcasing their cleverness.

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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