Nintendo's Origins

**Ben Gilbert** (0:00)
Oh, have I ever done my Mario impression for you?

**David Rosenthal** (0:04)
No, I would not expect you to have a Mario impression.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:07)
I don't know where this came from. Maybe all the Super Smash I was playing in college on N64, but here it goes.

**David Rosenthal** (0:12)
Hee hee hee, ho ho, ho ho ho. That is amazing, wow. I had no idea you had that in you. I'm very impressed.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:25)
See, I've been storing that up for this episode.

**David Rosenthal** (0:28)
Wow, when Charles Martinet moves on from this mortal coil, I think Nintendo knows who the replacement is going to be. Ho ho, hee hee hee. That is so good. I'm never going to be able to look at you the same.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:41)
Good, that was the goal. All right, let's do it.

**David Rosenthal** (0:44)
Let's-a-go. Is it you, is it you, is it you?
Is it you, is it you, is it you?

**Ben Gilbert** (1:02)
Welcome to season 12, Episode 3 of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (1:11)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:12)
And we are your hosts. Video games are an absolutely enormous industry with a market size of over $100 billion of consumer spend every year. That makes it bigger than Hollywood and the music industry combined today in 2023 And while we are all aware that games are a fixture of life today, from your kids playing Minecraft on an Xbox to you popping open Candy Crush on your phone for a flight, this phenomenon of humans spending all this time playing video games is actually pretty new. Once upon a time, video games were a tiny niche market aimed at just teenage boys as a subset of the toys category that had fits and starts. It was not all up and to the right. And in the early 1980s, the video game industry in the US had some dire straits and nearly evaporated entirely until Nintendo made a huge bet and changed history forever.

**David Rosenthal** (2:09)
Oh man, I've been a gamer all my life. I love video game history. I was so looking forward to doing this episode and covering Nintendo and I had no idea what an incredible story it is of how Nintendo single-handedly resuscitated this industry and achieved 95 percent global market share and dominated this multi-billion dollar industry that was left for dead. That is the story we're going to tell today. Like we're not going to get to the Switch. We're not going to get to the Wii. We're barely even going to get to the Super Nintendo.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:43)
Yes. On this episode, we'll be covering Nintendo's early years or at least the first 100 years of the company up until about 1990 Then I think we have a part two in the works because the story of Nintendo after 1990 is like a completely different company and a completely different set of analyses to do. Consider this a part one and truly a story all to its own. Well, listeners, we have a big announcement. We are renaming the LP show. The LP show has been public for the last year and has effectively served as Acquired's ESPN2 channel.

**David Rosenthal** (3:15)
The deuce.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:16)
Yes. We are going to make it official. The LP show is now known as Acq2. It still has the same great expert interviews with founders and investors like Vijay Raji, the former Facebook exec who founded Statsig, and Megan Reynolds, the head of capital formation at Altimeter. You can still find it in every single podcast player, whether you are an LP or not.
If you have never given it a shot, there is no better time. Just search Acq2 in any podcast player and we have some banger episodes coming up in the next couple of months on the calendar. For our LPs, just so you're not confused, we will keep updating your old feed with all these new episodes, just so you don't miss them. And speaking of the LP program, we are revamping it. It is not going away. We want to basically shift away from it being about these episodes and make it more about bringing you closer into the Acquired kitchen. So for our limited partners, we're bringing back private Zoom calls that we'll email you about the next one soon. And we'll be adding a new feature. You can help us pick future episodes. So LPs, look out for an email on that and more stuff to come. You can join at acquired.fm slash LP. After you finish this episode, come discuss it with the other 14,000 smart, thoughtful, kind, curious members of the Acquired community at acquired.fm slash Slack. And without further ado, David, take us in. And listeners, this is not investment advice. David and I may have investments or make investments soon in the companies that we discuss. And this show is for informational and entertainment purposes only.