Super Mario:  How Nintendo Conquered America, by Jeff Ryan

Growing up, I was a passionate player of video games and had a Nintendo, then a Super Nintendo, Game Boy, as well as N64, at which point I stopped playing video game consoles or seeing them as worthwhile items of purchase.  Suffice it to say, then, that I am someone who has at least a strong potential interest in a book like this that scratches the itch of nostalgia for a time when video game consoles were of particular importance.  This book is a corporate history of Nintendo, and it is written with a great deal of flair and style.  Little details make this book better, including the way that the author uses coins to adorn the page number listing and the way that the titles of the chapters relate to various games and consoles.  The author is clearly passionate about Nintendo the company as well as their games and consoles, and he offers the company some advice throughout the course of the book as well.  Whether or not the company wishes to take up the author on any of that advice or not is a different matter, though, I suppose.

This book, by and large, tells a chronological tale of Nintendo from its humble beginnings to its present period of uncertainty in the face of changes in the video game industry due to gamer habits, and takes about 300 pages.  The book is divided into five parts and 25 chapters.  The first part of the book looks at Nintendo and its offerings in arcade games (I), such as the birth of Nintendo of America (1), the creation of Donkey Kong (2), the MCA-Universal lawsuit over the copyright of King Kong (3), and the video game crash of 1983 (4).  After that comes a discussion of the 8-bit Nintendo games (II), including Japan and the Famicon (5), Super Mario Brothers and the birth of the NES in America (6), the lost levels (7), Super Mario Brothers 3 (8), the NES and the Gameboy (9), and the rise of Sega (10).  After that the author talks about the 16-bit era (III), with chapters on the Sonic-Mario showdown (11), the many Mario spin-offs (12), Mario Paint (13), Nintendo’s discs (14), and the Virtual Boy and 3-D games (15).  The fourth part of the book looks at the 64 bit era (IV), with chapters on the N64 (16), Nintendo DD (17), Gamecube (18), Game Boy Advance (19), and Mario’s saga (20).  Finally, the last part of the book discusses the WII (V), with chapters on the DS (21), Wii (22), three days in the life of Nintendo (23), the future of Nintendo (24), and how they survived the problems of 2011 (25), after which the book has acknowledgments, a bibliography, and index.

This book is the story of a small and quirky Japanese company that made good and became a gaming behemoth that has managed to survive a great many of the shifting gaming patterns, at times being a near-monopolistic segment leader and at other times, more recently, being a niche gaming company that attracted older and more casual gamers.   The author has some definite thoughts about the decline of consoles–something faced by all of the industry players–as well as desiring that Nintendo get into the theme park business as a way of leveraging its lovable characters.  Whether or not this is a wise policy is not something I am equipped to say, but to be sure Nintendo faces a time where it will be necessary to decide if it is worthwhile to keep making consoles as well as games that are part of endless franchises or whether it will be worth moving in a different direction.  What Nintendo will do is still not clear at this point.