 So, last time we were talking about Nintendo started as a trading card game, LCD calculator. The man seemed bored, just playing around with it to pass the time, and Gunpei was like, hey, what if I use that same IC circuit, integrated circuit, to display characters instead of numbers. And the Game & Watch was created. It proved to be Nintendo's first foray into electronics. From there they had had the extendable arm, and you could tell now that the 80s were coming around the advent of the shift from a large single centralized PCs, big servers from which remote terminals accessed it remotely. That evolved into individual PCs, so essentially everybody had their own personal computers. Now this shift phased over from centralized arcades with big boxes to more home family entertainment centers, and Atari was getting on the bandwagon or creating, building it, maybe. So, Nintendo smart enough to tell Jin to make portable. Of course the technology wasn't extremely advanced, but it was such a novel concept that you could play a game portable, not plugged in, not hooked to a large TV. So that, that was revolutionary for the early 1980s. So, Nintendo, next phase, after the Game & Watch was their famous arcade title, radar scope. About to see the invention of Donkey Kong, remember Yamauchi, who was the president, the owner of Nintendo, so he's delegating and although he has smart smart very creative designers such as Miyamoto and Yokoi, under him he has to direct them and allocate funds for the right projects that he thinks are going to be a hit. So we're leading up to the invention of Donkey Kong Mario, Game Boy, well the NES and a couple of years later, the Game Boy. Miyamoto Shigiro, Miyamoto's working on a masterpiece, which in a way it kind of was, it's still very, very much an enduring video game, an enduring artifact in video game history. Of course, Shiro is based on the popular, very, very popular movie, ongoing movie theme. So, Miyamoto was the main guy and he was given Yokoi as an assistant and he taught, and Yokoi taught Miyamoto all he knew about game design to get him started. For the most part, Miyamoto was left alone to create this game, Donkey Kong. Stages, Miyamoto wanted to get the license to create a game based on Popeye actually, but he wasn't able to. So he had to choose, he had to create his own characters though. As Miyamoto was developing Donkey Kong, the playable character, the guy that the user would be playing, was known as Jump Man, probably not too hard to figure out, it's because he was able to jump. He'd be up against the villain known as Donkey Kong. It's the first platformer in which the character could jump over obstacles, which generally caused some to deem it the first platformer. When the game was finally finished, they sent it to America and the few employees of the company didn't like what they saw. Rather than have his new genre, they wanted Miyamoto to create a game with a maze or a shooting genre like Pac-Man or Asteroid. I don't know what I'm doing with my hands there, but they later approved it, but weren't sure about the name Donkey Kong in Jump Man. Yamauchi allowed them to change the name of Jump Man, though he refused to budge when it came to Donkey Kong, so he liked that. When trying to come up with the name for the main character, Nintendo of America's landlord went in the room demanding his rent check, guess what his name was? Mario Segale. Game was sent to two bars in Washington. By the end of the week, the arcades were chock full of quarters. Needless to say, the employees of Nintendo of America were shocked to hear this and immediately ordered replacement chips for the unused radarscope units. Nintendo had only five employees in the American branch, cutted the radarscope units and prepared them for, so that was kind of where we left off last time. It was the radarscope emulate games like Pong from Atari and Space Launcher, but it was a it was an arcade unit. Yeah, I guess it was just because it wasn't it just wasn't a good game. People didn't like it and they had created and actually manufactured a bunch of units to sell to America and they were industrious enough and creative enough and resourceful enough to essentially re-tool and modify the electronics that were in radarscope and recode it with new software to create Donkey Kong, so there now that Donkey Kong was a hit. They were running against the clock, you know, trying. Yeah, so that's fascinating that the American Division of Nintendo just relayed on their rent and their landlord was named Mario and I guess he had enough character to probably get a little deduction on either that or they were that impressed with this guy's personality that they wanted him to be the spearhead. This happened in a very short period. Donkey Kong became the next big worldwide hit. It was reported that the game was so successful that Nintendo in Japan couldn't keep up with the American demand for the game and this was 1982. All right, during this time period, Yamuuchi designated Masayuki Uemura as the leader of a group who would envision who would envision a home console that was technologically superior to all the other systems on the market, though was at the same time more affordable. Their dream would take a few years until it was realized. Capitalism had its finest right there, Universal Studios, though had taken notice of Donkey Kong and they had concluded having fringed on their King Kong license. He started with the small fry first and attacked Kaleiko who had acquired the license to distribute Donkey Kong from Nintendo in the US. Of course, they passed the bill and Nintendo was given a letter saying that they had to pay royalties for every unit they sold. They would have to cut a little small check, or maybe not so small, relatively, to Nintendo or Universal. Nintendo of America's Howard Lincoln and the rest of the NOA, Nintendo of America, agreed not to give in to the threats, so MCA and Universal sent them to court. The whole gist of this is that the ultimate decision boiled down to the fact that Universal, although they had created or been the studios in which a lot of King Kong movies were made, the idea, whatever you call it, the actual intellectual property called King Kong was actually at that time already part of the public domain, which means you can use it. Everyone charged you royalties and actually Universal then had to pay Nintendo 1.8 million dollars in damages. Getting some nice money it showed that Nintendo had balls and they earned a reputation not to be fucked with. It actually says that, that's why I emphasized it. And it does make sense that if you're a pushover and successful people are going to come after you. But so anyways, Nintendo earned their feathers, so to speak, their stripes. In 1983 Nintendo released the Famicom, and so in 1983 Nintendo built a new manufacturing plant in Uji City, that's UJI, which would replace the one built in 1950 for toys mainly. Same year Nintendo actually got on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Nintendo's about to blow now as they say. They were, they just bet, they had the foresight, the vision to see that technology in computer chips, which were the driving force behind the implementations of new technologies, were only getting cheaper, smaller, faster, more powerful I guess you'd say. Basically I gotta catch myself because this is a really long article and there's absolutely gonna have to be a part three. Make it interesting because there's lots of bits that definitely aren't interesting. So Yamuuchi, like any successful businessman, relied on negotiation tactics to get lower prices for his raw materials, which in this case is computer chips for his Famicom consoles. There was one company that was holding out on a man where they were charging a hell of a lot more than 2,000 yen per chip, computer chip at the time. What was it called? They really wanted to do it but they don't say what type of chip it was. Anyways, he bargained, he hackled them down by telling them that they would be purchasing 3 million chips in the next two years. So the guys are like, okay, when you bring your unit volume up to the millions, you can make a lot of money. So no doubt that was a big number for them. End of the development stage, Nintendo had to ramp up the price of the Famicom. So this is that, I'll show a picture, hopefully I already did, but it's that red and white precursor to Nintendo's entertainment system, the original NES, which most people think of as the original Nintendo console. So they had to ramp it up by $25 because unexpected costs. 1983 was $100, which is probably like, I'd say it's probably similar. Let me look it up, came $240 today. So relatively, compared to the $400 consoles you're getting today, I think that's what they are, right? It's not too bad. But let's get on the Mario. So 1983 wouldn't only be the year that marked the release of Famicom, the Famicom, the family computer, this was also the year when Mario Brothers was released. So this was an arcade video game. Miyamoto intended for the game to be a heavily multiplayer focused video game. It was important specifically for introducing Mario's brother Luigi, who acted as the game's second character. In the game, Mario and Luigi would have to clear the sewers, which they had invested with nasty critters and bugs, or which had been, they didn't do it. They didn't. To do so, they would have to go underneath platforms in which they were stationed on and jump, causing them to tumble on their head. Following this, either of the brothers could knock the enemy away by simply touching them. Though if they're not knocked over and the two connect, the player will lose a life. So you can already see some of the mechanics of having to kick over a turtle for him to be safe to touch, or else they get you. The game is noted for being a cooperative and competitive game. Players can assist each other by defeating foes through the prominent goal, although the prominent goal is to receive a better score than the other player. In the game, Mario and Luigi were nearly identical at this point, with their simple palette swaps. So Mario being, I think, white and red, and Luigi being green and white. As the series progressed, so did the two characters' distinctions. There's a brief stint with Atari. They were going to partner up with Atari, but they decided not to. There's some little drama here, but it was essentially the fact that Atari would have probably ultimately squashed Nintendo's budding industry in America. So by a series of fortunate events, Nintendo didn't end up partnering with Atari, and they ended up becoming competition for each other, because they were going to partner up with Atari to release the Famicom, which would have Mario on it, Donkey Kong. So there was an infamous video game crash of the 1980s which had affected the entire industry in America, and they were actually ready to sign papers with Atari. But during the event, Atari witnessed an illegal Donkey Kong prototype playing on a Coleco console, and it was an illegal prototype, but Atari assumed that meant Nintendo was working some backdoor deals, and that they had given them a version of Donkey Kong to play on their consoles. So they got pissed, and called the deal off. Almost tried to sue them, actually, but Atari would have owned the rights to Famicom, and they would have just shelved it, and tried to actually push their own Atari 7800. But Atari as a whole was ill-fated, and when the video game crash had taken the course with Atari, and brought with it the entire empire, nearly every other was trying to distribute consoles at the time. So now with no competitors in the market, Nintendo was like, let's get on this. 1884 happened. This is their time to shine, so they're in full swing. They're trying to really, really pump out really good quality games with the Famicom, and they shift their entire business model from arcades to family, home, entertainment centers, because why not? How many? There's a lot more homes, individual kids than there are arcades. So in 1984, many arcade games, however, were released that would actually later be ported to the Famicom. They hit games such as Balloon Fight, Clue Clue Land, Duck Hunt, Excite Bite, Hogan's Alley, and Wild Gunman. They're games such as F1 Race. This is a sequel to Four Nandoo G, and the final entry to the Donkey Kong arcade trilogy, Donkey Kong 3, second one being Donkey Kong Jr. Finally, there was a big debut, a boxing game called Punch Out, with two exclamation points. All right, in 1985 now, Nintendo let loose the Famicom, which was revealed to be released in America a year prior as the Advanced Video System, or AVS, was renamed and revealed as the Nintendo Entertainment System in Las Vegas. So, okay, so that's why it wasn't technically it. It's just a revamped Famicom, as all NES was then. I didn't realize that. So Nintendo started a 1985 boom in which they delivered. So, yeah, Nintendo, they're trying all sorts of stuff now. They're like, all right, we had a hit with Donkey Kong. Early escaped a fatal deal with Atari, who eventually got bankrupt, or I don't know, they went bankrupt, but they failed as a company. Yeah, they had some good streaks of luck, really. So they want to capitalize on it. And they have an NES now. They're putting out great games. And now they want to really set themselves up for success. So Yamauchi, Hiroshi Yamauchi, the CEO, the owner of Nintendo, split his research, his R&D research and development team, into four segments, including Nintendo R&D 1, 2, 3, and 4. They're all headed by different people, and given different assignments. It would be the biggest group of the bunch, and would go on to create many other games released for the NES. The group known as Team Ishikiru emerged from R&D 1. There was a little robot called Rob at one point. Didn't go very well with product testers. Proved that kids would like it, though. Yeah, creator showed that device, showed it to a bunch of children, and according to him, the reactions weren't as positive as he had hoped. And the kid said, quote, this is crap and that it sucks. That's so funny. Clearly it did, because he released it with an NES and it flopped. Now a group of programmers in Japan were hard at work on starring the star from Donkey Kong, titled Super Mario Brothers. The game would send the series in a new direction and setting. Instead of being placed in Brooklyn, New York, Miyamoto would create his own universe, entitled The Mushroom Kingdom, where he was getting his creativity from. Single player experience had the player choose between Mario or his brother Luigi, though their abilities were virtually identical. In the game, the antagonistic bowser would kidnap Princess Peach due to her ability to revert his magical attacks. So there used to actually be a reason he would kidnap her instead of just because Mario and Luigi heard of the news and immediately departed to save her. They traveled through over 30 stages and eventually defeated the beast, thus saving the princess. The game had expansive scrollable levels, various enemies, different environments, and an amazing physics engine. The game far surpassed anything ever released by that and helped propel sales of the Famicom in Japan when it was released, but it was bound to make a even bigger impact in America. Yeah, that just goes to show you NES. I mean, it wasn't really a miracle that Nintendo succeeded in the industry. It would have been crazy to think that they could have such a quality product on the hardware and the actual software of great games like that and still fail. But they didn't. They did really good. And yeah, people just caught on because it was a really fun game. It was an expansive universe, like it said, and you can get lost in it. And it was fun to play. Another video game. It would be hard to replicate the success of Super Mario Brothers. And while financially it didn't happen, it did technologically with the video game The Legend of Zelda. The Legend of Zelda was made to coincide with the release of the Famicom disc system. And the disc system was a bit pricey at $100, but it was well worth it to play Legend of Zelda. The game was important. So why is the Legend of Zelda so important? For one, it's generally thought to be the major precursor to the console role-playing genre and the action role-playing genre. The game isn't a typical role-playing game, though various aspects were emulated in future titles, such as the setting, epic music, which was really epic, character design, story and character progression, and overall scale. It was just huge, monumental, so it was hard to beat, you know, because you really got immersed in the world. And it was truly a pull you away from reality, able to do that. So it was a big hit for a year, a little over a year in Japan before we even saw it in America. And so Shigeru Miyamoto was heavily inspired on his childhood when creating the game. He said he would explore the many mountains of Kyoto when he was younger, and would venture inside the caves with a lantern in his hand. Miyamoto would implement his idea of finishing a game to see the ending in Legend of Zelda, as he had done with Super Mario Bros. Whereas most games were at that time simply played by gamers just to receive a high score. So that's fascinating that you could make it more of a narrative with an actual arc, story arc, and an ending at least, other than just levels, trying to get high scores. Other genres, other games released during this time were Donkey Kong 3, Urban Championship, Gumshoe, and a console version of Mario Bros. The Legend of Zelda in these games weren't the only titles released, but Nintendo still needed to release the console in the rest of America, Europe, and Australia. So like I said, they're just rolling them off one after the other. They had Mario Bros. Legend of Zelda. Those were riding on the back of the wild success of Donkey Kong. So now they're going to take it from an historic one to a more, so they're going to shift, they're going to evolve from the past to the future now with Metroid. They wanted new weapons, they wanted it to be futuristic, lonely setting, and the players would gradually obtain new weapons as they increased health through progress in the title. They took control of a character named Samus Aran, who would find secret areas blast through hordes of enemies and engage in challenging platforming segments. The game was meant to take the popular platforming of Super Mario Bros. and merge it with the exploration of the Legend of Zelda. At the end of the game it was revealed that the player was in actuality a woman, but the player actually had to finish the game in a certain time to be able to. The title actually did terrible upon its release. Alright, so Nintendo still put in a lot of games. Fun fact, in June of 1986, Miyamoto and his team worked to create a direct sequel to Super Mario Bros. that was actually titled Super Mario Bros. 2. The game looked nearly identical to the first title, though was deemed too challenging so it actually was never released in America or Europe. So yeah, Nintendo is just smashing the market right now. They received 1986, it was in America, 87 it went to Europe, and yes, with the console essentially released worldwide, Nintendo and their third parties would release a continuous stream of titles. Third parties actually however were forced to be limited to five games per year as a part of the Nintendo seal of quality, which is actually really, it's a really smart idea. So I think that the legend of Zelda, I think what made Nintendo the legend that they are today is really their quality. It's like Apple, and it's like music. Shitty music might be popular for a week or a month or a year, but it's the quality music that endures. I wonder how many contemporaries of Beethoven or Mozart or Bach there were that were famous that we just don't know about. So Nintendo was just smart and they maintained their seal of quality. 1987 rolls around, we start to have the legend of Zelda's release in America has become a huge, huge hit. And I have to remember my, my nanny, where this kid's grandma whose house I used to go over, she would make the sandwiches and tell us to go play outside. And I'd walk inside to use the bathroom and she's in the small dark room, not to unlike this without the books, just sitting in her chair with a little controller playing Zelda and yell at me to stay out because God forbid I hit the power button or unplugged it or knocked over a cord or something and lost all our progress. So actually, maybe that was why I never played Legend of Zelda much until Nintendo 64 actually. Okay, so 1987, the smart year that Kanpei Yokoi start to develop his handheld system, his handheld version of the NES, which was, of course, titled the Game Boy. Yeah, Nintendo just started blowing up from there. So I'll, I'll try to make the next episode if I do, I might not because we kind of all know the history of Nintendo from here, but it might be more of a relevant nostalgic trip for all of us. If I do one just purely dedicated to the consoles from the NES to the Switch. But yeah, so the NES, that was, that was a lot of information. I really thought I would actually get through the entire history of Nintendo right there, but didn't even make it to the Super NES, didn't even make it to the Game Boy actually. So sorry about that. Element if you thought I dragged it out, wait to give me some constructive criticism. Anyways, that's, I don't know, I've done a lot of interesting stuff there. I had no idea that was emerging in a dying video game console market. So I think again, like Apple, like that they were able to survive a harsh market like that. And it's really no wonder that Nintendo is the superpower they are today. They just had good programmers, efficient hardware designers, good negotiators apparently, and creative, most importantly creative people. Hope you guys enjoyed it. And just want to thank all you guys again, like always, for your likes, subscriptions, especially your comments. I love reading your comments, even if it takes me a couple days so until next time guys, I hope you all sleep very sound and well.