CHRIS NUTTALLreviews Playing to Wiin: Nintendo and the Video Game Industry's Greatest ComebackDaniel Sloan; Wiley; £16.99
FEW COMPANIES have come close to matching the ability of either Apple or Nintendo to tap into technology’s appeal to consumers over the past 10 years.
Apple’s iPod, iPhone and iPad have enjoyed great success, with more than 160 million devices sold. With a slight head start, Nintendo has sold more than 200 million of its DS hand-held and Wii home consoles.
Based on opposite sides of the Pacific, they share similarities. Both have needed inspirational leaders (Steve Jobs and Satoru Iwata) and creative geniuses (designers Jonathan Ive and Shigeru Miyamoto) in turning around the companies. The focus of both on entertainment and design is predicated on what will captivate the consumer, with both resisting the temptation to pile on features just for the sake of having the latest hardware. They also share a secrecy about their inner workings and have the capability to surprise and transform their sectors with their products.
Much has been written about Apple’s revival under Jobs. Daniel Sloan, Tokyo correspondent for Reuters for 15 years, gives us the rarely told story of the comeback kids of Kyoto. He documents the history of Nintendo from its origins as a playing-card maker in the 19th century to its rise and fall and rise again as a dominant force in the video game industry.
Iwata is only the fourth president to lead the company since it was formed in 1889, and the first not to be a member of the founding Yamauchi family. He succeeded Hiroshi Yamauchi, its longest-serving leader, in 2002. Yamauchi had expanded the business through a deal with Disney to feature its characters on playing card decks. But, in seeking to diversify, he made several wrong moves, from running love hotels and selling instant rice to developing bowling alleys.
However, setting up a games development department in the mid-1960s led to a breakthrough the following decade with a laser shooting gallery for arcades. That led to games for its own early home video systems and a portable unit called Game Watch. The family computer or “Famicom” in Japan, introduced in 1983 and which became the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) internationally, was the device that drove Nintendo to dominance of the global entertainment industry.
Yamauchi, however, recognised it was the games software and not the hardware that was the key to Nintendo’s success. He was lucky to employ Miyamoto, a man who has become a giant of the industry, with one success after another over the past 30 years.
Miyamoto joined Nintendo in 1977 after taking a degree in industrial design. In the 1980s, he developed the Donkey Kong, Marioand Legend of Zeldagames that have become huge franchises for Nintendo to the present day.
Miyamoto’s creativity was blunted, however, as Nintendo brought out more complex and less successful hardware in the late 1990s and early 2000s, slipping behind Sony’s PlayStation console and facing a challenge from Microsoft and its Xbox.
It was time for Yamauchi to consider a successor and it was a surprise when the stern 74-year-old patriarch chose his apparent opposite. Iwata was a video game maker with a gentle, self-deprecating sense of humour and a belief games had to be fun as well as good business. He arrived at Nintendo after running a small independent studio that made games for its consoles.
Teaming up with Miyamoto, he led the success of the DS and the motion-sensing Wii as Iwata stressed the need for "less is more" consoles that would draw in new audiences. Miyamoto also drew from his own hobbies to create new games: his love of dogs led to Nintendogs, his habit of weighing himself turned into Wii Fitand the bathroom-scales balance board accessory.
The book is thorough and well-researched, drawn from contemporary sources and Sloan’s own reporting, but it lacks new insights. This is probably because there were no interviews with company executives specifically for the book and the author does not take the reader into the company’s inner sanctum.
I would have liked more about the thinking, relationship and personal experiences of Iwata and Miyamoto, the internal workings of game development at the company, and a sense, from gamers perhaps, of what magic formula has given its games such a huge following.
Nintendo is preparing to venture into 3D with its 3DS hand-held console due out next month, while a successor to the Wii could come later this year.
With Super Mario-style obstacles overcome, Nintendo's adventure goes on and should continue to engage us almost as much as its games. – (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011)
