Playing for keeps
BOOKS
Nintendo has a firm grip on kids’ minds
Billboards advertising the new Super Mario Bros, action movie, based on characters from the enormously popular Nintendo video games, ominously state, “This ain’t no game.” They ain’t kidding. In his book Game Over, U.S. writer David Sheff lays bare the corporate machine beneath the high-technology “fun” of Japan’s most profitable company, Nintendo Co. Ltd.
number of gee-whiz business facts in Game Over. Nintendo is bigger than Sony and earns more on a per-employee basis. The company’s sales reached $4.7 billion last year, generating more profit than the three major U.S. television networks combined. By 1990, there were Nintendo games in onethird of all the households (30 million homes) in North America, where it had been launched about a decade earlier. But, to Sheffs credit, he also delves deeper. The author provides valuable insights into Nintendo’s highly focused marketing strategy—and into the market itself. Nintendo’s enormous success in North America tells volumes about the status and style of modem family life. The company has managed to weave itself into the fabric of the family partly by establishing direct communication, through special telephone lines, newsletters, magazines and a “Fun Club,” with a generation of computer-literate children who are more frequently left alone while their parents work.
GAME OVER By David Sheff
(Random House, 432pages, $31.50)
of Kyoto. As Sheff painstakingly documents the history of Nintendo and its relentless rise to dominance of the global toy industry, he effectively—and permanently—debunks any romantic notion of eccentric, elfin inventors creating games for delighted children around the world. Instead, the author depicts a cutthroat business that fuels demand for its own product through the blatant manipulation of youngsters—and that routinely engages in vicious legal battles and high-powered politics.
Sheff incorporates an almost indigestible
In attempting to deconstruct Nintendo’s hypnotic hold, Sheff notes that part of the appeal is a deft homogenization of folklore, literature and pop culture, as well as its exceptionally interactive nature. Unlike TV viewing, which is basically passive, Nintendo lures children into g a personal universe where I they can exert control and I make critical choices. As the z popularity of Nintendo has 85 increased steadily over the past five years, Sheff writes, “It was as if America’s kids had joined a cult and were under the spell of a cartoon character who did the bidding of a hidden Japanese lord.”
The software or “game” component of the Nintendo “entertainment system” is by far the most critical. It must catch the players’ attention within seconds and retain the game’s challenge by keeping it fresh and complex, but not overly frustrating. Each game cartridge costs about $45, and the most popular, including Super Mario Bros, and Tetris, sell millions of copies. The third
version of Super Mario Bros., featuring Mario and his brother, Luigi, has sold about seven million copies in North America and four million in Japan.
Sheff s discussion of the subliminal lessons contained in Nintendo’s extensive library of over 1,000 games is similarly intriguing. While such classic children’s characters as Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse preach harmony and fair play, the existential world inhabited by one Nintendo hero, Mario the Plumber, is fraught with confrontation and apparently insurmountable obstacles. Explains Sheff: “Mario imparted other valueskill or be killed. Time is running out. You are on your own.”
Indeed, many of those same values seem to apply to the toy business itself. Game Over chronicles the development of Nintendo from a playing-card manufacturer founded in 1889 into a dominant global presence in the world of high-tech entertainment a century later. Along the way, Sheff introduces a rich cast of characters, including the autocratic Hiroshi Yamauchi, who has run the company with an iron fist since 1949, and his determined son-in-law, Minoru Arakawa. Like a valiant video-game protagonist, Arakawa successfully established Nintendo in North America during the past decade, despite repeated setbacks and the huge odds against his success.
After a fierce corporate rivalry over-saturated the video-game market in the late 1980s and drove prices down to devastating lows, Nintendo persevered and gained a new grip on the battered U.S. market. Sheff turns the account of Arakawa’s struggle—and eventual triumph—into an analysis of some of the key differences between Japanese and North American business culture. He focuses on the Japanese corporate tradition that encourages executives to retain a strong commitment to one specific goal as well as the longer-term horizon of Japanese investors, which prevents pressure for immediate financial returns on ventures.
Many readers will find cause for concern in Sheff s description of Nintendo’s calculated appeal to its young consumers and its careful control over supply and pricing of its products. But his depiction of Nintendo’s U.S. rivals is even more unflattering. Thwarted in their attempts to win a legal challenge against Nintendo’s allegedly monopolistic business practices, companies including Atari and Magnavox easily succeeded in their appeal to American xenophobia and partisan politics. By convincing some congressmen that a Japanese company was taking unfair advantage of a lucrative U.S. market, Atari managed to launch a series of trade investigations that, in 1990, resulted in a $30-million fine for Nintendo as well as a $20-million legal defence bill. But given the annual profits of the company, those measures are minor—and Nintendo appears to have beaten those rivals at their own game.
DEIRDRE McMURDY
