Reading – Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America

Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America*, written by Jeff Ryan, covers the history of Nintendo from when Nintendo of America started in 1980 to the beginning of 2012. I grabbed the book in the airport Saturday morning and immediately found myself blasting through the pages like I was blasting ships in Space Invaders: Jeff Ryan’s writing is clean, quick-reading, and as fun as it is informative.

It’s On Like Donkey Kong

Ryan dives right into the book by setting the stage for Nintendo’s entrance to America. It’s 1980 and video games are awesome ways to attack everything in sight and the company sets up operations with the goal to sell 3,000 arcade machines for a game called Radar Scope. What amazed me most was that the machines were built in Japan and shipped to the US; that shipping alone had to cost a fortune and, to make it worse, Radar Scope just wasn’t selling.

The book then takes us through the process of Nintendo struggling to succeed as the company accepted that Radar Scope wasn’t a great game, decided to create a kit to transform the game into something new, and then brought Donkey Kong to the world. If it wasn’t for one game’s failure then the world may have never seen Donkey Kong . . . or Mario.

Mario is Everywhere

One thing that Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America* does very well is drive home to us just how important Mario is to Nintendo. Game after game after game finds Mario lending his moustached face to the screen to help move games. Staring, co-staring, and cameos all keep Mario in the public’s eyes and it wasn’t until reading the book and thinking it through that I realized Mario is everywhere. If I were a hardcore video gamer or journalist I would have already accepted that, but it took Ryan’s book to really make me see it.

System after System

Another thing Ryan does is helps me see just how many video game consoles have existed in my lifetime . . . and how for the last six or seven years we’ve been playing with the same machines and it’s getting time for a new wave of consoles. My XBox 360 works great and fills my needs, but I can admit that a new machine with remarkable new games might just get me to buy a new system. And I’m a very casual video game player and not at all the target market; those guys must be dying for a new console. I’m also starting to think about all those old video games I’ve collected over the years—maybe it’s time to trade in your old video games and make room for the next generation.

Worth a Read

Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America* is a great read if you have even a casual interest in the world of video games. Ryan’s writing is fun, his subject remarkable, and there’s a lot here to learn if you haven’t been studying Nintendo for thirty years.

If you like to smash the A button then this book’s for you.