In 1980, Nintendo and the entire video game industry was on the verge of collapse. Then, a newly hired apprentice came up a crazy idea.
40 years ago, no one thought video games would survive. The industry was a wreck. Games were terrible. Parents hated the pricing model. Things got so bad that Atari, once an industry pioneer, buried 700,000 game cartridges in a landfill in New Mexico.
The industry was so dead, it’s not overstating things to say that it owes its existence after the crash to what happened at Nintendo in 1981.
Shigeru Miyamoto was hired as a planning apprentice. He had passion. He had imagination. And he was a low-level grunt. He would draft game designs by day, and dream about a whole different kind of game by night.
Nintendo tasked Miyamoto with creating a game that would re-use arcade cabinets from their failed “Radarscope” game, Miyamoto wanted to try a totally new idea – in a time of smoky, seedy arcades, why not create a game everyone in the family could enjoy? And if that game was about a pudgy plumber trying to rescue a princess from a deranged gorilla, what did Nintendo have to lose?
The game, “Donkey Kong,” was a blowout success, and Mario would go on to become a household name. Nintendo pushed forward with games for the whole family. The games industry exploded in America, and Nintendo dominated for the next decade.
In the past four decades, video games have risen from a fad to the dominant market in the entertainment industry. Valued at over $200 billion dollars, video games now net more revenue annually than television, movies, and music combined.
But it didn’t have to go that way.
And it probably wouldn’t have, if Nintendo hadn’t made one great hire.
