Factually! with Adam Conover - Nintendo's Empire of Secrets with Keza MacDonald

Episode Date: April 15, 2026

The video game industry is in a state of chaos. Layoffs, buyouts, studio closures, mergers—the entire industry seems plagued. Except for Nintendo. The Japanese video game giant is over one hundred years old, and since they dominated the home console market in the 80s, they’ve been generally unwavering in their success, and all without succumbing to the pitfalls of other game companies. But they’re also tremendously secretive, operating with very little behind-the-scenes publicity and deploying their massively innovative games with relatively little lead-up. This week, Adam talks games with Keza MacDonald, a video game editor at The Guardian. Her new book, Super Nintendo: The Game-Changing Company That Unlocked the Power of Play, takes a look behind Nintendo’s curtain of secrecy to show how this company has been able to innovate and surprise for so long. Find Keza's book at factuallypod.com/books--SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a Headgum podcast. Hax is back for its fifth and final season, and so is the Hacks podcast. Join the Hacks creators and showrunners, Lucia and Yello, Paul W. Downs, and Jen Statsky as they unpack the Emmy-winning comedy series. On each episode, here's stories from the set, what goes on in the writer's room, and how these beloved characters close out their final season. Watch Hax streaming exclusively on HBO Max and listen to The Hacks podcast. on HBO Max or wherever you get your podcasts. I don't know the truth. Hey there, welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me.

This week, we are going to be taking a break from all the bad news and the serious topics. Talk about something that's just nice and fun and pure and mostly good in this fallen world. Today, we are going to be talking about one of my favorite things on Earth, Nintendo. You know, everyone is a mark for something. and for me, it's Nintendo. I grew up in the heyday of the NES. I had a subscription to Nintendo Power Magazine. I used to take the posters out of the magazine

and hang them up around my wall. And, you know, I don't have Nintendo shit all over my walls and my adult home anymore. But Nintendo, the games, the characters, the design, the vibes. Well, it's about as close to being a part of my personality as anything in pop culture can be. And look, Nintendo is,

a corporation operating under capitalism like any other, and it's not always great to have those hooks so deep in you. But I actually think I came out pretty well, because as far as these companies go, Nintendo is a really weird and interesting example in the firmament of IP-based media entities. There really is no company like it. They've somehow avoided a lot of the horrible and shittifying things that have happened to so many other media properties that people love. I mean, look at Marvel and Star Wars. Sure, those started out as interesting artistic projects, but a couple decades later, they were bought out by Disney, a globe-spanning mega corporation so that the life can be sucked out of them over the next hundred years of,

you know, horrible reboots and television project nobody wants. By contrast, Nintendo is a single Japanese company that was founded in the 19th century over a hundred years ago, and in the year's they have never been bought out, they've never been merged, and they've fundamentally never let their work decline into pure slop. They have somehow defied the trends that have bedeviled the rest of the media industry and the tech industry. I mean, they went through the mobile phone revolution, but they still sell their own hardware and their own games the same way they did a few decades ago. And those games are still fucking delightful. They are still inventive. They are still creative.

They still give you pure joy when you play them. I mean, look, not every single one of them are great. But on the whole, they're an incredible example of human creativity being spread under capitalism, which is vanishingly rare and even more fascinating. They've done all of this under relative secrecy. I mean, the company almost never gives interviews. Almost the entire creative team is in Japan. and the same people have worked for the company for decades,

which has given Nintendo this kind of Willy Wonka's chocolate factory effect where, you know, every so often new and wondrous things come out of their doors, and we don't know how or why. Well, today, we are going to take a peek behind Nintendo's curtain, because on the show this week, we have an author who has written a new book about Nintendo, about its history, about its process. She gets closer than almost anybody else to the secrets of how Nintendo does what it does. And don't worry, we are also going to be talking about some of the not so great

things about the company. We're not going to be uncritically glazing Nintendo, but we are going to talk about what makes this company so unique in the world today. Now, before we get into it real quick, if you want to support the show, that URL, of course, Patreon.com slash Adam Conover, five bucks a month gets you every episode of this show ad free. We also have a lot of other wonderful community features as well. If you want to come see me live on the road, April 18th, I am taping my new hour, my new special at the Den Theater in Chicago, Illinois. After that, May 8th through 9th, I'll be in Kansas City, Missouri. Head to Adam Conover.net for all those tickets and tour dates.

And now, let's get to this week's episode. Gheza McDonald is one of my very favorite video game writers. I have read her work for years. I read a wonderful book she wrote about Dark Souls a couple years back. And she is a video game editor at The Guardian. And she has a fantastic new book out with all kinds of incredible new reporting on this company that is so foundational to who I am as a person and that I love with my whole heart

until the day that I die, even though I know it is not perfect. We're going to get into it on the show. Her book is called Super Nintendo, the game-changing company that unlocked the power of play. Please welcome Keza McDonald. Keza, thank you so much for being on the show. You are most welcome.

I have been talking about Nintendo a lot for the last 30 or years, but oddly enough, I don't get sick of it. Neither do I. I mean, I've loved talking about Nintendo my entire life. It's been one of my main topics of conversation when I'm not worried about war or death or disease. I want to break from those things. I take a little break and I think about Nintendo or I talk about Nintendo or I play Nintendo games.

And as time goes on, I have been more and more shocked at how special a company Nintendo has remained. What a strange thing they are in global capitalism, that they basically have been doing the same thing since the early 80s, like the almost the exact same business model in defiance of every trend in technology or capitalism. They've never been merged. They've never been bought out. They've never really unshittified in a true way. Not yet.

But I mean, there's always a future, right? But like the way that we use personal technology has totally transformed, right? We've been through the mobile phone revolution. And yet Nintendo is still selling, you know, hardware for a couple hundred bucks and then games for, you know, $40 to $70 that you have a fun time on. And they've continued to thrive. Exactly. What is it about this company that is different? What is the soul of how they've done it?

I really believe, and this is hard to say of any company that wants to make money. Of course, Nintendo wants to make money out of us, but I truly believe that the kind of development for, of that company is fun first. And that's been the case improbably throughout all the kind of 40 plus years that it's been making video games. The core of it has always been, what's delightful, what's fun. And then they've had a lot of very clever people over the years applying this philosophy of what's the most delightful thing we can do with all kinds of different technology, right?

So from, you know, the Game Boy, which is the most basic, like technologically basic games machine that's possibly ever been successful through to like the switch now with detachable controllers and the Wii with motion control, they're always thinking about what is something we can do that's really going to make people smile, really. And although obviously Nintendo now has a bunch of merchandise and a bunch of franchising and they have theme parks and they have movies and all this stuff, there is still that core of like fun coming first. And I think that's what makes it feel different as a games company from all of the other ones. Yeah, when I, Talk about Nintendo to people, because sometimes Nintendo will do something weird and people

be like, why did they make this particular thing? And the thing that I figured out years ago, and maybe it's from reading some of your prior writing on Nintendo. Maybe I got it from reading a games journalist like yourself, but is that they are actually not a video game company or a technology company. They're a toy company fundamentally. Yeah. Yes, they've always made toys.

Yeah. Yeah. And what they think about is when they are innovating. is how do we come up with a new way to play that would be fun, rather than a better graphics card or whatever it is. Does that seem accurate to you? Yeah, I think that's about right. There's been, you know, this started in the 2000s, right?

There was a period of time where every single games console manufacturer was just trying to make something that had better graphics, you know? And technology was at the center of video game innovation because it's such an interesting art form, right? It's part technology and part art. In fact, it's both at the same time fully. It's the marriage of those two things, right? So the idea of technology driving progress in video games was the case all the way through the 80s and 90s.

But then the kind of mid-2000s that started to stall a bit. And the push for graphical realism started to feel a bit hollow to the people working at Nintendo. And that's when they came out with the Nintendo DS and the Wii, which were two technologically kind of backwards, but incredibly successful. and incredibly fun pieces of tech rather than ones that are, you know, they've sort of completely opted out of the arms race, like Sony and Microsoft have taken that up. The Xbox and PlayStation have been battling out for a good like 20 years now on who can have the most powerful console. And Nintendo quite some time ago just went, nah, we're not going to do that anymore.

We're going to think about it a little differently. And no one's really, you're never sure with Nintendo whether their strange little bet will play out, you know, like some of them haven't. There's been some pretty bad. like the virtual boy was a pretty bad flop. You know, there have been some, yeah, some overstretches over, you know, decades worth of history.

But when their bets do land, then they land really well and they tend to be kind of 100 million selling things. Yeah, and they defy common wisdom over and over again. You know, I remember when after the sort of iPhone, iPad revolution became ubiquitous, and it was the 3DS Wii U era, where, which were both, you know,

flops to varying degrees, 3DS did okay, Wii U is a massive flop. People were literally saying, hey, Nintendo should sell to Disney and just start making phone games, basically. Yeah, man. It's so funny. Like, every single time there's a Nintendo investor call, there's several people on the line being like, hey, why don't you just, you know, put Mario on a phone and charge people to jump? You'll make millions. And the patient explanation from the kind of creative and business leads at Nintendo being like, no, that would be an absolutely terrible idea every time over.

and over for years. It must be exhausting for them. Well, and what they did was they released the switch, which when that came out, there was a lot of press like, oh, this is kind of underpowered. It's like using like some old Android technology, like what's up with this? And then that goes on because they thought about instead, no, how will people want to play with this device? What is a form of play that will meet the needs of not just hardcore gamers or phone users, but like people in general? It went on to be an enormous seller for a decade without even ever getting a technological upgrade. Like it doesn't, didn't get a year over year, you know, it's not like the iPhone where it's like,

hey, buy a new one every two years. It's like, I literally used my switch for 10 years until I bought a switch to just last year. And like that's, it's in defiance of literally every other tech trend. So let's talk about the early DNA of the company, though, because I think that'll help explain some of it. The company is well over 100 years old. Tell me how it started. So Nintendo started out as a playing card company in 1889, so a very, very long time ago.

And the founder of it was a guy called Fusajiro Yamuichi in Kyoto, in Japan. And this was at a time when Japan was just starting to reopen trade and culturally to the rest of the world. And also there were other, there were laws about gambling that had been loosened slightly. So as a result, Yamuichi, who was a Hanofiwaii, who was a Hanofi. Fuda card maker, which is like a Japanese card game, he was able to start making these, these artisan all handcrafted cards, right? And so Nintendo started off as a company about play, but it was a different type of play. It was it was card games. And then in the mid, the mid-1900s, it was taken over by his grandson, Hiroshi Yamuchi. And then Nintendo started to do all kinds

of stuff. Like it started importing Western style playing cards. So it was the first company actually to bring Western style playing cards, like with the four suite. and everything to Japan. And they'd put Ultraman characters on packs of cards. They'd put Disney characters on packs of cards. They start to sell cards as not like a gambling thing or something with shady connotations, but as a family entertainment instead.

And then from there, Nintendo started making toys. So all kinds of weird and wonderful toys, actually. They made a teeny tiny little vacuum cleaner that was remote-controlled that would vacuum your desk. They made an RC car that could only turn left. They made a whole bunch of. of board games based around like baseball and popular TV shows

and they made sort of papercraft airports. They made all kinds of weird stuff, right? And every now and then they'd have a big hit. And then they got into video games in the late 70s and early 80s, which isn't surprising because this company was full of toy makers and tinkerers, right? It was full of electronics engineers

who'd been messing around making essentially whatever they wanted. They really did seem to have carte blanche. And so it wasn't surprising at all, really, that that particular group of people ended up trying their hand at video games. And obviously, that's the thing that made Nintendo's name that made Nintendo, like, the huge entertainment company that it is now. But before that, it really did try everything, including rice, rice distribution at one point, Love Hotels, memorably, but briefly, was another one of its ventures. Love hotels, specifically like a hotel where you go to, uh, rent a room for a short

period of time to have sex in. Exactly. It's like, it's like a Japanese, uh, It's a necessity because most people in Japan, still now, but people live in family homes, right? People live with their parents. People live with their grandparents even. So they serve a necessary social function, love hotels in Japan. But yeah, I think they had a small chain of them for a while. That actually seems useful to me. I'm like, hold on saying, yeah, why doesn't it exist in the U.S.

a chain of not seedy, like nice? You know, you need a nice room to fucking, we're going to clean it. It's not going to be a flop house. right? I'm like, yeah, hold on a second. A lot of people could make use of it. There's a big bowl of condoms right by the bed. You know, why not? There's themes. There's themed rooms, you know,

depending on whatever you're into, there's themes. I really feel like it's a surprise to me that these haven't made it out of Japan. But I think perhaps they've been normalized there for so long now. It would scandalize the Americans, surely. It's also funny because Nintendo's an extremely family-friendly company. So this is a funny part of its DNA that it has not continued.

But it has continued other parts. I mean, literally a couple years ago, I bought some Nintendo Hana Fuda cards. They are still making the, they are still a playing card company as they have been since the late 19th century, right? Since like literally dates with 18 at the front. Yes. And there's the same company in Kyoto, the same company that used to make the playing card stuff, like the materials, the paper. That company still makes the manuals and boxes for Nintendo's games even now, 100-something years later. That's crazy.

Yeah, it's wild. So let's say you're bigfoot. You're eight feet tall. You're not quite an ape. You're not quite a bear. You homestead in the Pacific Northwest, but you snowbird in Appalachia. You don't photograph well or often.

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Folks, this episode is brought to you by Alma. A year from today, who do you want to be? What version of yourself would you like to meet? Would that version of yourself feel less anxious or maybe feel more like the real you? Maybe your relationship is stronger or the grief that you carry feels smaller. What if that thing you've been secretly worried about

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Japanese business. Because I know that like long, you know, companies like this that have very long lifespans are not uncommon in Japan. And also something that seems connected to me is the fact that the same people have worked for Nintendo for so long. That like, in addition to Shigara Miyamoto, who is famously been there since the 80s, who's, I assume many people who are listening to this will have heard of.

There's like many, many other people who've just been, you look at the credits of a new Nintendo game. It's like, oh, the same guy who made this game that came out last year also composed the music for Super Mario Brothers 2 in like 1985 or whatever. And there's been a full-time employee the entire time. So what is it about Japan that causes this to happen? It's like, it's really interesting because the, it's a Japanese business culture. There's two things that, you know, you have to bear in mind.

One is that family companies are much more common in Japan, like family-owned companies. And until quite recently, Nintendo was the Yamahuchi family's company, right? And it's still, like, the Yamuichi family still owns quite a large part of Nintendo. So that means that you have an almost, like an almost patriarchal system in the company where there's like a family head who's the head of the company. And then lots of other members of that family usually work for that company as well. That's quite common still, even now. Capcom is like this. Capcom, the guy who was the head of Capcom, he had three sons. And those three sons were like

the CTO and the CFO and then also the guy who made Monster Hunter, you know. So there's that. And the other thing is in Japanese labor law, it's actually a lot harder to fire people than in a lot of the rest of the world. So a lot of American companies and European companies to a certain extent, they'll make something, staff up, fire everyone, go back to concepting. And then when they need to staff up again, they'll hire a bunch of people, then the project will end, and they'll fire them again. Nintendo doesn't work that way. It keeps steady teams and people work there for literally their entire careers, which again, not that's unusual in Japan, but it's still unusual enough. You know, it's still, it's still notable that people choose to spend their entire working lives

working for Nintendo. You've got people there who are in their 70s who are still, you know, who are now approaching retirement. People like, you know, Shigeruimamoto, who's 74 now, I think, maybe. And his cohort of developers, right, these guys that sort of built the Nintendo, we know, who made the first Mario and Zelda and Metroid and F-0 games, all these things, a lot of them are still there now, and they're maybe, or maybe they've recently retired, right? And then you'll sometimes talk to, so I love talking to people who work at Nintendo Cause. Whenever I research them, I find that they had some really tiny bit part on some Nintendo 64 game that I was bizarrely obsessed with as a child.

So there was some dude I was talking to who worked on, he was working on Splatoon, but he also did the wave physics for Wave Race 64, and I was like, Let's talk about the wave physics for Wave Race 64. Famously incredible wave physics on the. I remember that game. Everyone's like, wow, the water on that's crazy. You know what? That one was great for the 90s.

But Nintendo is a family run, but it's still a publicly traded company, right? But the family controls the company to some degree? Not anymore, but they still own quite a lot of it, like the Yamuichi family. So Hiroshi Yamuchi was, he died in the, I think, mid-2000s. But he was in charge of the company until 2002, until he was like an old, old man. It really felt like he'd been in charge of the company for 100 years by that point. It was about 60 years that he was in charge of it. Wow.

And then, so his grandson, I think, is still, he doesn't work for Nintendo, but he's still like a, you know, I think he's on the board or whatever. But yeah, so you have, there's more of it. It's a publicly traded company now. It has lots of different investors. And it has done since, since it's, it's, it's, kind of slowly expanded in terms of who's an interest, but it still has creative control over itself, which has kind of insulated it from the insane vacillations of the stock market and the

kind of wisdom of the tech industry. I think that's one of the reasons why it's been able to be so weird is because it doesn't, you know, if something like the Wii U, right, if any other tech or tech adjacent company had a huge flock product like that, the CEO would be like falling on a sword, everybody would be fired. There'd be a massive shakeup. They'd reorganize it. They'd bring in all sorts of new people. They'd fire everybody who made a mistake.

Nintendo doesn't do that. It kind of stays the course and it lets people then just do the next thing. And then the next thing, of course, was the Switch and that's been hugely successful. So it feels like Nintendo's failures are sort of, they're part of the strategy. Like, they're permitted. You know, they're a feature, not a bug of how it works. And only in sort of doing, letting the same people cook for like a long time and maybe letting them make mistakes along the way.

Only then do you get the sort of consistent quality that Nintendo's known for, I think. Yeah. It's so striking in its difference with American capitalism. And not just because of what happens after a failure, but even what happens under success. I mean, if you look at any American video game company that started from around the same period, right? Sierra, Lucas game, Lucas Arts, right? Amiga. Yeah.

No, I mean, that's what I'm talking about, Atari. Amiga's French. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Atari is a perfect example, right? Because dominated the industry in a similar to way to the way Nintendo did. Those companies get bought, sold, merged, split off, like, you know, put under another brand. Then they're sold for parts, like over and over again. So, you know, a company like a claim right off the top of my head.

That's an American company, I believe. Like, it's vaporized. It doesn't exist anymore. You know, Atari as well. But when you look at these Japanese companies, they're so stable, not just Nintendo, but you mentioned Capcom, which is just, you know, in the 80s,

hey, they just were a company that made video games. They made Mega Man and, you know, other companies made other games. But all the American companies that made games in that period, like, no longer exist. Exactly, yeah. And many of the Japanese companies are still like, yeah, we still make Monster Hunter games,

we still make Mario, we're just continuing to do it. Is there something different on a larger scale in Japan that causes that sort of, you know, house flipping mentality that American capitalism seems to have? We're going to buy and sell companies for parts, right? Constantly. Why does that seem to happen less? I think that kind of hyper capitalism is a fairly American phenomenon. It doesn't really happen in Europe either.

It happens a bit in Europe, but not to the extent that it does in the States where companies are, like you say, literally vaporized. And then you get the kind of shambling corpse of that company sometimes reanimate because someone buys like the brand and the assets or whatever. And then 10 years later you get some horrible zombie version of that same company kind of arrives back. And I think in most countries, in the EU and in Japan, like just simple like business laws prevent that kind of thing from happening as much, I think. But I do also think it's cultural. I think it's partly cultural, partly to do with the economy and the laws and the way that the working culture. I think all these things kind of come together to create just a different environment. Because like, you know, if you look at Square Annex has been going since the 80s, Konami, also since the 80s,

Capcom. All these companies have had vacillations in their fortunes. Obviously, Capcom is riding high right now, but it was doing pretty badly for quite a lot of the 2010s. And so these Japanese companies do, they tend to be, they're more, like you say, they're more stable. they don't, the stakes aren't so high. They don't rely on every single product being a kind of do or die situation. And there isn't that business culture of as soon as something doesn't do well, then you jump in and start like ripping it apart like a shark and then selling off the parts to other people. That doesn't seem to happen. So I think it's a, it's a combination of things.

Like some of its law, some of its culture, some of it's just how the economy is different in different places, but that, you know, the way that the North American games industry works is brutal for the people who work in it, right? Like tens of thousands of people just being laid off every year at the moment. Yeah. And yeah, that's not really happened in Japan. Well, and we're living through this era in which the entire American media industry seems to basically be collapsing. Print media, broadcast media, the movies, video games, all of these companies are, they've They've merged. They've, you know, become an appendage of a, of a tech, of like a Facebook.

They have lost their way in various ways. I mean, if you look at the movie industry, which is like, you know, as sort of comparable to Nintendo in a way because it's like a local industry that was built up in a particular country. It's like 100 years old, you know. Yeah. You've got these grand old studios Warner Brothers Paramount with history. They've got vaults.

They've got like, you know, I. that people love, and these companies are currently buying and selling each other and collapsing, and they're going, how do we even get people to watch movies anymore? We don't, I mean, it seems to be impossible. I guess we got to sell ourselves to ExxonMobil or whatever the fuck. Yeah, what we've got to do. We've got to get AI to make movies now. We're going to just continually devalue the thing that we make and devalue the people who make it.

And for some reason, that's not working. Yeah. And the public who still likes the product is like, hey, what happened to me? movies. I used to like them. Why don't you guys make them anymore? And the same thing happened in video games, right? The American video game industry, they're collapsing. They're stopping to make games. They're canceling games right after they come out. And the American video game consumers are like, could we continue to pay you $60 a bunch of times a year to play a fun game? Like, hello, we liked it. What's going on? And Nintendo and some of these other Japanese companies

seem to like have resisted this and gone, yeah, no, there's still a market for people having fun and we're just going to continue to sell this shit. Like it seems like they have, they have not gotten in their own way the way American businesses have. It's because of the infinite growth prospect, right? Like the ideas that like, so the reason that a loss of the games industry is in trouble is because, well, there's lots of reasons, but one of the reasons is because during the pandemic there was a ton of investment because everybody was at home all the time and couldn't do anything else apart from play video games, right?

Yeah. So, but then the growth, the growth projections were based on that. And it's like, well, obviously that's not going to be the case forever. Anybody could surely see that. And yet we've now got the situation

where there was just like gigantic overinvestment from all sorts of, from all sorts of corners coming into video games. And then as soon as they're not seeing like mega, mega, mega returns on that, then all the money disappears. And like a thousand people lose their jobs. And it's impossible to run a creative business like that.

Like it's just not, it's not sustained. to run things like that. And also, so there are now a few games, like 10 games that make a big gillian dollars every year. There's Grand Theft Auto 5, Fortnite, Minecraft, you know, Roblox. There's like a few that make all money. And then everyone's, oh, cool, well, let's all of us try and compete with these five Megalift games. It's like, that's not going to work, is it? Like, if you've got every single company trying to make a forever game that takes everybody's time and money, then no one's going to win. It's like a, it's an unwinnable business. Whereas,

I mean, I do think that, you know, Nintendo, stayed, stayed relative, it was doing very well. And that's because it's still, like you say, it still makes games, you just,

you pay your money, you play your game, you have a nice time. Sure, you're not, you know, paying $600 a year to, you know,

for every single Fortnite battle pass and skin. But they're making, they're making perhaps less off each customer, but they're still like doing fine, they're doing business the way they have for quite a long time. And that it does still work.

It still works to do things like you did in the 90s and 2000s. Yeah. And there's something, there's a purity to it. And, look, I want to be clear. I'm such a mark for Nintendo. I'm like a Kool-Aid drinker.

You know, I'm naive. This is the thing that I allow myself to be uncritical of, you know. That's a purity. There's a purity to it, you know. Like I, and by the way, we're going to, we're going to get into some criticisms of the company in a little bit. I'm not that, I'm not completely, you know, throwing everything away here. But this happened about 10 years ago, but it really stuck with me. My partner at the time was, had just downloaded Kim Kardashian's Hollywood,

which is a very popular phone game. And I came. You know, I don't hate Kim Kardashian. Whatever. People were having some fun with that game. She was enjoying it. But I got home and she's on the couch and she's like visibly upset. And I'm like, what's the matter?

And she says, I spent $50 on the Kim Kardashian game. And I thought it would make it more fun and it didn't. And I feel so stupid. And I don't know what she had spent money on, but she felt like she had been ripped off by the game, right? She had this, like, kind of crushing experience with it. And I said, okay, hold on a second. And I went and got my 3DS,

and I got out the Animal Crossing game that had come out like a couple years prior, Animal Crossing New Leaf. And I put it in and I created a character for her. And I was like, here's how it works with Nintendo. You give them $40 and then they want you to have a nice time. Like, that's it. Revolutionary.

like revolutionary they're not going how do we get you to keep paying for the nice time you know like do we show you 10,000 ads yeah if you think about it that incentive structure almost doesn't even make sense in america anymore where like you they've already got your money why would they want to still make sure that you're having a good time wouldn't it be cheaper just to trick you to get your $40 and then give you a shit time that's what how most of America works but no Nintendo says pass your $40 first and then we have tried so hard to surprise and delight you and make something beautiful and fun and enjoyable. And like that that is it's such a pure thing that it almost seems hard to believe it still exists under capitalism, you know? That's so sad though, isn't it? Right. And again, I don't think that they're that they're wonderful angels or anything like that. But it's, it is such a rare experience now that it seems sort of remarkable.

You're there like, this game isn't actively trying to rip me off five stars. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For real. So I want to keep talking about why exactly this is. First of all, in terms of the way that they've been able to, you know, not be bought up or cursed, you know, in America, when a company goes public, it really is like, oh, wow, you're doomed now. because the shareholders are going to get their say

and the shareholders are going to demand that, you know, we want short-term returns and you can't build anything long-term anymore. And the CEO is going to be thrown out and you lose control unless you're Mark Zuckerberg and you've created some horrible way for you to maintain control of the company while still being public.

What is protecting Nintendo from this happening despite it being a publicly traded company? I think that it is the fact that they've structured it in such a way that the people in charge of the company still get control of creative decisions, right? And I don't know the percentages anymore. I think Nintendo is still, it's publicly traded, but not like wholly. I think it's still, it owns a lot of itself, if that makes sense. But I also think, like, on a fundamental level, the people who work at Nintendo are video game enjoyers, you know? There are people who came to work at Nintendo specifically because they have

love in their hearts for the work that Nintendo does. And that, that is the case from the, lowliest people who've just started all the way up to the people who've been working there for 40 years, right? 50 years even. And I think when you have like a collective, there's no business goal brought in at the top. Like there is in every single other industry that you could care to name, especially that I've worked in media for 20 years, right? And basically there's always someone who used to run like literally at one company I worked

at, they brought in a guy who used to run a chicken factory. And they're like, this guy's now in charge of them. And I'm like, really? This is how we do this? You know, he's good at efficiencies. He's like, well, we got to feed all of you less. That's very clear. Kill you earlier, feed you less.

Yeah. But, you know, there's like this kind of quite ghoulish corporate class that gets kind of put in charge of creative industries, right? Whether that's media, whether it's film, whether it's TV, whatever it is. And then that has not happened. It's not happened at Nintendo. And it's happened elsewhere. And I just think they must have some pretty ironclad. They must have some pretty ironclad, like a way of preventing this from happening.

But they promote from within. They don't tend to get people from the outside into run things. There have been four presidents of Nintendo. Two of them were Yamiuchi family. One of them was this guy Saturaoato, who was in charge during the Wii and DS era, who was like, you know, to the bone, a gamer. He was like a gifted programmer. He was making games on his calculator for his friends to play in class when he was like 10.

You know, he was he had the heart and soul of a gamer and he was brought in because of that, you know. And he'd worked with Nintendo since he was in his late teens, early 20s and then ended up running the company. And the guy who runs it now has also worked there for his whole career, right? So they get people who really care. And I think that as long as that continues, there's a certain amount of protection. Because you do hear, like, because Nintendo does investor calls, right, like everyone else. And you can listen in on those, like you can't any publicly traded company. And the questions that are asked by investors, that comment I made earlier about, like,

why don't you monetize Mario's jump? I wasn't kidding. There was a guy who suggested that. They should make a Mario game for mobile and you should charge people for Mario's jumps. And I just thought, can you imagine how, like, I can't think of a worse idea. Yeah, what if you take the most free action that you can? take, the thing that makes you feel like you can go anywhere and

do anything and meter it and charge you for it. And that is the approach. That is the approach that almost every other game takes on mobile is like, well, you can play it for a little bit, but you know, if you want to keep swapping gems and bejeweled, eventually you've got to give us some money. You've got to pay for your meter. You've got to pay for time. You've got to pay. And this is the

thing, right, the most popular genre of game in Japan and China, I believe, is the Gatcha game which are, they're kind of randomized rewards, you know. So you You play the game and then you pay, you pay, you know, you pay for a chance like a new character or new costume or new item, right? And you pay essentially for pulls at the lever to get a fancy new thing. And those are wildly, wildly popular and they make a ton of money.

And they're monetized completely differently, right? They do that thing of like, give us more money, give us more money. And you can play those games without paying lots and lots of money, but you're constantly resisting. You're like resisting all of this pressure that the game design is putting on you. And the game is worse. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, because you're feeling that pressure and the game is designed around trying to get people to give you money. A game that is fundamentally designed around trying to create friction and create a bad time and make you want stuff that you can't have, that's not fun. Like, fundamentally, you're always going to be, that's an impediment to creating something delightful. So, yeah, maybe it is kind of sad that Nintendo is one of the, one of relatively few of the big game companies that seems to be, if not immune, then certainly very resistant to the whims of the wider capitalism in general. but I'm glad, I'm glad they're still there doing their thing in the way that they do. That's true. And this is, by the way, proof that you can't just say, oh, it's just because of Japanese culture, by the way. Culture is important and I think it is interesting to see how, because we think of capitalism as being this bloodless, ruthless enterprise about money.

But culture does affect it in ways that are interesting and we can talk about. But it's clearly not all that is part of the secret because gotcha games are predatory and they're extremely popular. and Nintendo does not make them. In fact, the only, the game that came closest to that format, there was a 3DS game called Rusty's Real Deal Baseball. Is that what it was called? Do you remember this game? I recall the title.

I never played it. So it was this really weird 3DS game. It was the only Nintendo game that ever really had microtransactions. And the way it worked was you went and talked to this dog who would, like, sold you new items and new features in the game. but he was kind of depressed and he would, this is a real video game.

He was depressed and you could, and you could haggle with him and he'd be like, okay, this is like 99 cents and you could be like, hey, how about 40 cents? And he would be like, okay. And that was like a game mechanic. And so the game wasn't like, it was sort of making fun of other predatory

like DLC micro transaction games because of giving you the ability to haggle with the guys selling them to you. So even their dip into that, was sort of remarkably creative and strange, you know. But I think what is fascinating, though, about their creative culture, let's dwell on that for a second.

Because creative culture is really important, but one thing that I've observed, at least in American industries, American media, is that you can get a really good creative culture, but it usually doesn't last, you know? Like, I think about something like, the high point of the Simpsons, right? Oh, they had a golden five years

where everything came together. And if you look at it now, well, the show's not bad, but it's certainly not what it was at the time. And a lot of the same people still work there. Some of the executive producers have been there the whole time. But for some reason, things didn't come together in the same way. Or you can look at Pixar, which had that incredible run. And I literally read a business book that they wrote about how they did it,

about the creative culture at Pixar and how they spent so much time and attention focusing on it. And that's how they made Ratatoui and Up and Wally. but guess what? Like 10 years later, they're making mediocre movies because that wasn't enough to stop the magic from like dissipating. And Nintendo has had up periods and down periods.

But when you look at it, it is this remarkable example of they've been doing this shit for 40 years. And like when you look at the Mario series or the Zelda series, it's like every 10 years, they are doing something remarkable with it that breathes new life

into it that creates a new way to play that pushes video games forward. And that that kind of run for an institution having that amount of creativity coming out of it for so long is incredibly rare and sort of violates my prior theory about like, hey, you don't always have control over when the magic comes together. So what do you credit that to? This is like one of the main questions I wanted to try and answer for myself when I was writing this book about Nintendo, right? because I've spent my whole life, you know, I'm a games critic, right?

So I've played just so many games from so many. And like Nintendo keeps like I say, kind of every five to ten years, they'll release something that for me really like brings me back to why I love video games in the first place. And I'm like, how do they keep doing this? Like I want to know, I want to like just out of journalistic curiosity, I'm desperate to know how they keep making this happen and how, you know, how Mario hasn't sort of devolved into slop. over time because like the way that most creative industries work is that you make something

good and then you have to squeeze it until it dies. Do you know what I mean? Like it has to get bad before it's finally cancelled or thrown away. And so you just end up with like stuff being wrung out until there's just nothing left in it. And then it's a shambling, you know, shambling version of its former self. And that seems to be the sort of inevitable thing of like creative things under capitalism. They get to the point where they, they just, there's nothing left in it. And so there's two, there's two,

those two main things. The first is that Nintendo has intergenerational teams, right? So the people who are making Zelda, if you're the newest girl or guy making Zelda, you are sitting there alongside the people who made Zelda in the 80s and in the 90s. And you are all working together. And it's not like a hierarchical thing where, you know, the guy's in charge of Zelda, let's say, A. G. I. Unuma, who made O'Kerina of Time. Well, he was on O'Carina of Time. And he directed some of the the most famous and most critically beloved Zelda games of the 90s and the 2000s. Let's say you're on his team. He's not telling you what to do.

You are all contributing to it. So you have the people who've been a part of the series since it was born. And those people have a real kind of core knowledge of like the soul of a game property, like the creative soul of it. And then you have all these people who are coming in with new ideas and new approaches and they've got their perhaps their own personal history, that same set of games. And then what you have is everybody contributing ideas. So something like Zelda, Tears the Kingdom or Breath of the Wild, those were directed by a younger person called Hidimara

Fuji Beashi, but still with those older people providing direction and contributing, and still with younger people providing ideas and contributing. So I think that's part of the key. You don't have like a top-down creative process where you have someone like Shigeromiyomiyomyo, obviously, is like a creative North Star for the company. He provides an awful lot of guidance, a lot of feedback, but he's not the one person coming up with ideas and that everyone just does what he says. Instead, they have everybody contributing. And so you do, I've always wondered how they keep the kind of creative, because especially Mario of Galaxy, that kind of period of Mario, when I was like, I don't understand how they just keep coming up with delightful new ideas.

Something would turn up in a level for like 30 seconds. It's like, you know, oh, Mario can swim through this globe of water now. And then that idea would be there for like one level and then it would disappear again. And they'd have so many ideas like that. And I'm like, how do they, they keep coming up with like a hundred really good ideas every game. And I think it's just sheer that it's the number of people that make these things. They're all contributing. And so everybody's idea has to go through this gauntlet. And then only the really the best ideas end up in the games. But it's very, very collaborative. And I think like making games is really hard, right? Anybody who knows anything about like working for a game developer will tell you

that making games is extremely difficult. And they usually take a long time to come together. So the fact that they keep creating things that are such high quality is really unusual. So the intergenerationalness of it is really important. And then I think the other thing is what we were talking about before, like people hang around. And because they hang around you, you preserve the institutional knowledge. And it's not just the people themselves. There's also apparently very, very good documentation within Nintendo. Like if you want to know how someone made something for the DS like 20 years ago,

you could just look that up on the internal like company documentation. I can't confirm this because obviously I've not seen Nintendo's internal documentation, but I have heard that they just have an amazing depth of how everything was done, and then everybody can learn from that as well. So instead of all this stuff just getting lost every time there's a new generation of consoles or every time there's a new generation of developers coming in, that old stuff still gets preserved and you can still go. And they do seem to have a lot of reverence for the earlier days of their most famous.

franchises. And I think everybody, um, everybody has kind of love and respect for those franchises. And it's funny, because I was talking to Shigeru Mimoto for the book, like I interviewed him, for the book in 2023. And talking to him, he's the guy who made Mario, you know, with, um, Takash Tezaka. And talking to him about Mario, he was like, you know, other people have raised him now. Like, I'm, I'm comfortable with him being someone else's Mario now. And I thought, that's also unusual. Like a lot of creatives don't do that. They're not comfortable passing on their creation to

other people or to a new generation. So they've also managed to pass it on like that, which I think is unusual and why it still feels fresh, I think. Yeah, the sense of continuity, I imagine if you're coming in as a new developer to Mario or Zelda, and you're working with people who also worked on Mario 3. And they're like,

Well, here's how we did it. And you're looking at the documentation, that kind of mix of continuity and new ideas being really powerful. And the density of new ideas as a creative theme is so pervasive in Nintendo. Like, I think a lot of times about the early days of the Mario series, right? Mario 1 invents the side-scrolling platforming game. Yeah. Then Mario 2 in the U.S. is like a completely different game, right? then Mario 3 is the first one where they do the thing you're talking about where almost I replayed that

game recently almost every single level is a completely different idea they're like hey how about in this in this level like an evil sun is chasing you how about in this level there's a huge fish that's trying to eat you how about in this level all the gumbas are wearing little shoes and you can get in the shoe and the shoe allows you to bounce around on you know stuff you couldn't bounce on before and so now you can traverse. And you're never going to see that again. And to do that as like the third, like every single game is a reinvention.

And then Super Mario World, which just, sorry to dwell on this, because I'm really geeking out. But like the fact, like that game is so fucking weird. Like the fact that that game is, the entire soul of it is that every level has a secret exit that's hard to find. And then that's how you get to,

you can't progress unless you find the secret exit. is like such a bizarre idea to have be the launch game for your new system. Like it could have been, hey, Mario jumps on Gumba's heads, but it looks better. And people would have bought a million of them. But instead, it's this elaborate game design idea based on secrets being hidden everywhere and on very complex interactions between shells and items and blocks and all this. And I'm like, how does one even? Yeah, if you have to find a secret key and then find the hole that the secret key goes

in which is somewhere completely different, you know, and like the, the rumors that it would generate as well. Like, as a member, especially Mario Bros. They were like,

on the playground, people would be telling you the wildest stuff about that game and you would have no idea where it was true or not, but half the time it really was because there were lots of strange little secrets in that game. And in fact,

even the insight for Miyamoto or whoever else to have, hey, let's put secrets in the game and then use like the childhood whisper network to distribute the secrets. And that'll be fun. right? To like somehow know that that like there's going to be a meta element of fun outside of the game itself that's going to be you talking about the game with your friends is like I don't know how deliberate that was but was it? I mean it's an insane insight to have. Yeah, I honestly think that speaks to a really core thing about Nintendo's design philosophy, which is that you trust the player. You trust their curiosity. You trust their intelligence. You trust their sense of fun, right? So you put stuff in the game.

game and you just trust them to find it. You don't have to be like, hey, hey, look over here. Hey, you know how most, you know, most especially now, this was especially bad in like the late 2000s, but you know, games would always be like here, remember this button? You got to press this button. You want to climb that ladder? Press this button to climb the ladder. Hey, you see that ladder over there. We're going to paint it yellow. We're going to paint it yellow now. You can go up there if you like. And the game just seemed obsessed with like holding your hand constantly and sort of guiding you because you were so stupid, obviously, that you couldn't possibly just be left to your own devices within a game world to figure out what was going on.

And people were so scared of there being friction and people getting stuck and maybe they'd give up on the game and maybe they wouldn't be having fun for a second. Whereas Nintendo has this really belief that people will, especially children, right? I remember playing Mario for the first time. I couldn't do it. I couldn't complete so much as a level. I remember spinning around in Mario 64 when I was about eight or nine, just like turning. I couldn't make him go forwards because I wasn't used to 3D graphics.

and he was just spinning around on the spot. And I stuck at it because I was, you know, they trust that players will do that, especially children. They trust children's kind of innate curiosity and their ability to find the fun. And so they'll hide things. They'll hide delightful things in the game, knowing that players will go and find them

and not thinking, oh, well, you know, what if we need to guide them specifically towards this particular secret or that one? They just know that, you know, they know how people play. And they trust the curiosity of the player at Zelda's like this. One thing that makes Zelda like just so, even as a kind of middle-aged adult now, it makes it so compelling to me is it just trusts your curiosity. It's like it lets you think, I wonder what's over there, and it lets you go there, and it lets you just find out.

And the answer is always something cool. It's never like, what's over there? Oh, it's an invisible wall. Or what's over there? Oh, it's, you know, something I don't really want or need. It's always just some little delightful thing. You know, it might just be a chest of rupees, or it might be a character, or it might be like a really nice rock formation. But whatever it is, there's something there.

And that is the soul of Nintendo games for me. It's like they trust you. They trust your human curiosity and playful nature. And they just let you run wild with it. And they don't put things in the way. You know, nothing is in the way of you enjoying yourself. And that's something that is why Nintendo remains so fun for me, is that there's nothing in the way of just getting in touch

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and use code factually for 20% off your first purchase. That's B-O-M-B-A-S.com slash factually, promo code factually at checkout. There have been periods where Nintendo's sort of forgotten that a little bit, but they always come back to it, you know, as a philosophy. And it's so, what you're describing hit so hard for me because, okay, a couple years ago, you know, I had played Breath of the Wild, and there were some talk about how, like,

oh, there were certain things in Breath of the Wild. like art moments or vistas that harkened back to the original Legend of Zelda for the NES. And, you know, I thought, well, when the original Legend of Zelda came out, I know it's a very famous game, very important, but I was too young to play it all the way through. The first Zelda game I was ever able to beat was the Super Nintendo link to the past. And I had literally set up my old NES with a CRTTV, my childhood NES. And I was like, you know what? I want to go back and play the Legend of Zelda the way that it would have been played in the

80s. So I bought myself a cartridge with a map and an instruction manual. And I played through the whole game without looking anything up, right? With just like drawing my own map, et cetera. And what I discovered was it was so remarkable because you go through this thing of like, okay, there's hidden, oh, there's secrets, there's hidden caves, where are the caves? How am I supposed to find these? And then you eventually start to realize the more you play the game, oh my God, every single screen literally has a spot that I can drop a bomb or a thing that I can push and there will be a secret there. And once you figure that, it like unlocks the whole game and you just start looking for, okay, where would they have hidden a secret?

Where would they have hidden a secret? What's going to be behind there? What's going to be behind there? And I had never experienced, I had heard that described, but I experienced it myself. And then I went back and I played Breath of the Wild and I thought, oh my God, it's the same fucking thing. Yes, it's got the same soul, isn't it? They've got the same soul those two games.

Yep, they, and literally I was like, ah, I see what happened. A bunch of new developers came in who had played that game at their original game as children, wanted to reproduce that experience. They're working with other developers who literally did work on that game. And they're saying, let's sort of create the same feeling again. To some extent, it's obviously doing a million other things too. Yes, yes. It's creating that same feeling of there are so many secrets you can go explore and find them wherever you look and you'll be delighted at every. return. And it was it was truly like a profound experience, a profound art experience for me.

And I have that all the time with Nintendo where you constantly have this feeling when you're playing their games of, oh, they remembered. They remembered how I felt 20 years ago. And they're saying, hi, yes, we were there too. We remember that as well. And you have a moment of communion with them. It's fucking insane. It's so rare to have that. Yeah. I mean, I really think that people often are quite cynical. Well, no, companies are often quite cynical about nostalgia, right?

Like, nostalgia is kind of like regurgitated food. You know, it's like, it's a sort of just a worst version of something you remember from being a kid. The difference with Nintendo is that it really does play on nostalgia and it employs nostalgia very well. But it doesn't patronize you with it, you know? It's not like, oh, here's that thing. you like, here it is again. There's always, there's a kind of reverence for your, like the, you know, the games from 20 years ago.

And again, because the developers loved and played them and you loved and played them. And it is like a moment of communion. And this kind of self-referential nature of Nintendo games, it's not, in my opinion, cynical. And it's not, like, exploitative in the way that nostalgia sometimes feels. Like, I have to say, I saw the kind of $550 Pokemon 30th anniversary Lego sets. And I just thought, oh, I'm not that sucker. I'm not going to be the guy that spends hundreds of dollars on some Lego

Pokemon, it just made me feel slightly insulted, do you know what I mean? I was like, who has $500 for Lego Pokemon in this economy? And then the opposite feeling for that is like that one you described about Zelda where it's like, we remember that thing where we're having respect for your feelings about that thing

and we're taking it somewhere new, you know? We're sort of revering the past, but we're not like just constantly trotting out the same thing and treating you like a mug. I feel like Nintendo's approach to nostalgia, maybe this is just because I am, as well as being a kind of journalistic expert on Nintendo. I am also a huge fan, obviously.

Maybe I'm giving them too much credit, but I don't feel like there is exploitative of childhood nostalgia as certain other kind of huge media conglomerates are. I mean, look, they're a company operating under capitalism. Of course, they're exploiting it to some degree. And there's times when it feels a little gratuitous. or whatever, but it feels like it's based on a reverence for the art, you know? Like, I remember playing a...

It's a continuum of art, right? It's a continuum of the same of the idea as a continuum of the art. It's not necessarily a retread. Yeah. And if you compare that, if you compare the experience of being a lifelong Nintendo fan and Joyer, the way that both of us are, with the experience of people who love Star Wars, for instance. Exactly. That's exactly the right comparison.

Star Wars, you know, look at the original days. It really was. There was a lot of creative genius. There was a lot of things, you know, things that were being done for the first time. A lot of stuff that really spoke to people. And then it dissipated and no one's ever really tried to have any continuity. You know, it's just like, well, no, we'll just keep selling this schlock to you. Occasionally someone comes through and has an interesting idea like Andor or, you know, people.

Or you could look at the prequels and say, well, wasn't it fun that George Lucas got to be insane? late in life and blah, blah, blah. Like, there's, you can, you can pick and choose stuff that maybe you enjoy, but in terms of what the, the main company, the Disney-owned Lucasfilm is selling to you, they're just like, yeah, you'll buy this sucker. Like, fuck you. Fuck you. You'll buy what we give you, won't you?

Yeah, I get that feeling. I get that feeling from a lot of, like, nostalgia-oriented things. I do get that feeling sometimes from Pokemon. I got to say, I get that feeling of like, come on, elder millennial. You wish things were just like they were when you were younger. here, buy this $500 Lego, buy this very overpriced Pikachu bomber jacket. You know, just buy it, just buy it. It'll make you feel better for a second.

But I don't get that feeling about Mario or Zelda or most of the other Nintendo things I love. And I don't get it, you know, always about Pokemon. I get it occasionally. But it is the most commercialized, like of Nintendo's many properties. Pokemon is the one that's been the most relentlessly, you know, exploited capitalistically. Yeah. To the tune of like billions and billions and billions of dollars. You know, it's the biggest entertainment franchise.

anywhere, of all time, anywhere in the world, Pokemon, like bigger than Star Wars, bigger than Marvel. But it's just insanely huge. It's just massive. And that's why, because it does, it exploits it exploits us. It exploits the OG Pokemon players. But it does also at the same time delight everyone,

you know, because it's both. Yeah. It's both at the same time. Yeah. And I'll just say that Nintendo fans, on the whole, I think, are happier than Star Wars fans, right? You don't get the same sense of like, they're not, like, occasionally, usually people would be like, oh, we didn't like that game so much.

You know, the new Metroid Prime game, ah, it's not that great. Or, you know, people have a little bit of like, ah, you know, they're not doing what I would prefer. But it's not this sort of like overall, like, contentious constant stage of fan revolt, you know, of people going like, well, fuck you if you're going to treat me this way. Yeah. I mean, Nintendo does have its entitled fans, right? But I think overall people, people aren't, I think people, I think it's partly because it's just, it's playful, right? And if you're really looking forward to a new Nintendo game and it doesn't hit, there's not the kind of, I really don't feel like there's the same like massive vociferous.

Like, people don't seem to get so angry as they do with stuff like Star Wars, you know? Yeah. They don't get angry about, you know, Zelda starring in a game, you know. I remember the female Ghostbusters controversy. And I was thinking like, God, I mean, it would be really, it would really be shitty if like, you know, Nintendo finally released a Zelda game starring Zelda and the. response was, oh, it's not supposed to Sir it's a little bit, and that's important, and that's

important, but that didn't happen. Yeah, no, of course that wouldn't happen. I mean, it just, the fans were like, we want to play a Zelda, come on. What's your problem? I also think that in terms of what Nintendo gives to kids, right? Like, it's still a company that focuses on kids.

One of my, one of my dear friends, her son, when he got to like three and a half became, Nintendo aware. And she was like, one day she was like, hey, would you FaceTime with my son? He needs someone to talk to Nintendo about.

I was like, sure, I got on the FaceTime with him. And he just started yelling like, Piranha plant. Like Fireball, Bowser. Like the kid just like literally wanted to say Nintendo words at me. But when he got old enough, I was like, look, get the kid a switch. And, you know, my friend was like worried about video games and, you know, screens and stuff like that. And I was like, get a switch and it'll be okay. and her experience was like, oh my God,

the Nintendo stuff is actually like good for the kid, right? Like Mario Maker is such, like, if you have seen some kids go nuts on Mario Maker, it is like better than Legos. Like it is such pure creativity. Like to go play a level, a child who you know made in Mario Maker is like such a wonderful experience.

It's very, it's very wholesome in that way. So look, let's not just glaze Nintendo for the entire interview though. We indulged. We had a good time. We've led our fanboys out here. Our fanboys have had a lot of time to play.

Well, you know, fanboyism is, you know, uncritical love and unexamined love. I think it's really wonderful to go deep on what is good about a piece of art and what is remarkable about it.

It's critical. This is the thing like I often say about like being a critic. Like it's, it's not like you're not allowed. it's not like you're not allowed to love stuff. You just have to be quite selective about the things that deserve your love. And, you know, for me, Nintendo does feel like it justifies the, it justifies the positivity that it attracts.

It's not uncritical. But like you say, there are certainly things about Nintendo that are not great. Yeah. And so let's talk about some of them, because I think the soul of being critical is to be clear-eyed about what you see and to talk about it deeply and have an investigatory frame of mind about it. So let's talk about the whole. animal.

Nintendo is a very secretive company often to its detriment, especially as regards its own history. I remember going to Kyoto a number of years ago, and at the time there wasn't even, you could go look at the building, but there wasn't like a museum you could go to, there wasn't, you know, et cetera. So first of all, why is the company so secretive? I think the reason for this is purely, it's partly, um, uh, company culture thing in that, so for instance, Shigeru Miyamoto does not particularly like

attention. As the guy who made all these wonderful things, everyone's always trying to get a piece of, you know, everyone's always trying to speak to him and understand, but he doesn't like having the spotlight on him. And there's a certain, like, a deference, like a, and it's like, I don't want to say it's like an intrinsic part of Japanese culture, because that would be incredibly reductive. But there is this not wanting the spotlight, not wanting too big a deal made of any individual person, right? So part of the reason it's secretive is because they simply don't see that it's that big of a deal to shout and like, you know, to make a huge deal out of what they've done. And then the other reason for, I think, is a quite simple business reason, which is that,

you know, they have an unnecessary level of secretiveness about how things are done so that other companies don't copy it, right? And that's also not uncommon for Japanese companies. needs to just have a very secretive business culture and very strict NDAs and things like that. People who work at Nintendo, they are properly muzzled, like they can't speak. If you ever leave Nintendo, you can't basically ever legally speak about what happened there

as far as I understand it. So there's partly just a reticence, right? And also, I think that it's just influenced by whoever's in charge at the time. Because the one time that Nintendo was sharing more about its processes,

was when it was under Satura Wata, who used to sit down for huge interviews with all of Nintendo's teams, no matter what they were making, whether it was like Links Crossbow training or the Nintendo Wii, but he would sit down and he would do these really insightful interviews about their process,

and he felt personally, as the CEO of Nintendo, really strongly about documenting that stuff and writing it down and making sure that people knew what was happening at that time. And he had a kind of sense of the history and the sort of need to to write stuff down because it would get forgotten

in 10 or 20 or 50 or 100 years, you know? And so I think the people who are in charge of Nintendo now, for whatever reason, they just don't share that personal conviction that it's important

to write stuff down, share it and document it. Or if they do, they're doing it within the company and not out with. I think it's really interesting that Nintendo's Museum, which did open in 2024,

you go there, and it's like a total nostalgia festival. It's got every single Nintendo game console thing, accessory. But when you look at all that stuff. It's all laid out, like a beautiful product museum. There's no information at all about who made this, why they made it. You know, it's products, but not process. So Nintendo was

very, very shy about sharing process. And that's one of the reasons I wanted to write a book about Nintendo, because I actually feel it's important for someone to write this stuff down. And also, it was very curious because I'm nosy. And I really wanted to learn. I wanted to sort of get to the heart of like how these things were made and why these things were made. And Nintendo will simply never tell us itself, those things. But then very occasionally, there was an exhibition at the V&A in London, which is a big design,

like the Victorian Albert Museum. It's a very prestigious museum. It's a design museum. And they took part in an exhibition there where they really broke down quite forensically how Splatoon was made, their most recent kind of hit at the time. And they had concept art.

They had concept prototypes of the game. They had lots of different materials from its creation. And that's the first time I'd ever seen Nintendo really share that kind of thing. So in a museum context, in that museum context, it was obviously happy to share it. But yeah, the secretiveness, I don't think it works in Nintendo's favor a lot of the time. I think that what Iwata was doing in documenting how things were being made in the thought processes behind the consoles and games that were coming out of the company, it obviously

didn't affect it badly. The company was really successful at that time. So I do wonder who decided that we were going to shut it down again and why. I still don't know exactly why. I wish I did. because I don't think it works to their favor. And I agree. And, you know, people want to know how these things are made.

It's important to the broader sort of creative community of humans on earth, you know, to understand. And the people you hear complain about this the most are people who care about video games as an art form and want to document the history of the art form for, you know, fucking humanity. Like we, like video games are. for better or for worse, one of the greatest new art forms created in the last century. And, you know,

we'd like to have some books about how they were fucking made, you know? And the fact that, like, it's difficult to, you know, you talk to anybody

who works in the sort of nascent field of video game history and they're like, this is a real problem that like Nintendo won't. You read about like, how did Breath of the Wild get created?

And people are like, oh, well, we think what happened is that, you know, there's been some generational turnover. It's like, it's like,

you're trying to figure out what's going out of the Vatican or whatever, you know, like by looking at the smoke coming out. And that's like not, it's not good. And also a lot of, sorry, a lot of the guys who are, you know, Mimoto's 70-something years old, Aounuma's getting up there. Like these guys are, some of the Nintendo's, like, most important, creative people are already, they've already passed away. They're not with us anymore. Like Satura Wach himself, who very sadly died of cancer in 2014. And so, So, you know, I really feel it's important for, I want somebody to write a biography of

Mimoto. Like, I want, I want that to happen. I want, I want ideally him to participate in that kind of project because, like, one day he won't be with this anymore. And we will not then have a record of one of the most important periods in the development of this art form, you know? Yeah. So I do think it's important, like, on a bigger level than just curiosity and nosiness.

I think it's important. And I think also that all companies like to do this. They like to, like, control the narrative, you know, of their own corporate. story or whatever. They like to just, they like to be in control. And when I, it says a lot that when I was writing my book about Nintendo, a lot of people were like, oh, are you scared that Nintendo will interfere in some way? Are you scared that they'll get in the way? And I was like, well, not really, because I just think that would be such a terrible look for them. But equally, I bet that, you know, there was, there was maybe some level of like, oh, someone who's not from Nintendo is telling

the story about Nintendo's writing a history of Nintendo. I bet, you know, on some level, there was probably someone somewhere in that company who was not happy about that, you know, because companies like to control their own stuff. But then, Also, if you're going to, like, you are part of the collective history of art now. Like, you have to let go, I think, of this like sense of control, especially about things that were made like 30, 40 years ago. Once things have been out in the world and they've become part of the cultural canon, they do become sort of public property in a way.

Not that we're entitled to like every development secret, but we're certainly entitled to some context, I think. It would be very good to have a bit more sharing. I, a really core memory of mine, this was like 10 years ago, but I went to the Nintendo store in Times Square in New York and there was some celebration happening. I don't remember what it was. There was some special event. I'm downstairs. It's full of

people. I go upstairs and in the back there's like an exhibit. There's like some a wall with some glass cases. I go back there and just placed in a case with like no fanfare around it is like here's

Shigero Miyamoto's original graph paper designs for levels 1-1 and one two of Super Mario Brothers one. And I was like, I was like, what the fuck is, what? Why is this here? Can you imagine a more important artifact in the history of video games as Shigeru? Hand-drawn graph paper.

Here's where the first Gumba is. Here's where the first question mark block is. Like he's drawn it out and they've then used that to create the level. And it's just sort of sitting. I was like, put this in the fucking met, right? Put a giant sign pointing to it saying, hey, look at this incredibly important. But instead they were just like, oh, no, let's put it there and not tell anybody. This strange disregard, a reverence for history internally, but a strange disregard for the history externally as something that could be shared with us is very, very strange.

But in addition to this desire for control also comes out in the fact they are incredibly litigious as a company. Massively. especially when it comes to fans doing anything with Nintendo work, which a lot of companies are to some extent. But in the case of Nintendo, this also really gets in the way of the public having a historical record of Nintendo work. So tell me about that. So Nintendo is very, very fond of shutting people down

over things like specifically modifications of games, right? So this is part of gamer culture. Like a lot of obviously a lot of people who've enjoyed video games over the last, you know, 50 plus years of their existence, they're very techy people. And so a lot of people have tried to take Nintendo games and modify them, right? Nintendo absolutely hates this. We'll not allow it because in their corporate view, it is analogous to piracy, right? So Nintendo cracks down incredibly, incredibly hard on piracy in all its forms to protect its income. and that's fair enough, I guess, to crack down on piracy.

But that then extends to cracking down on anyone who does anything with Nintendo property. So whether you're making a fan animation, whether you're making a little, you know, a fan movie based on any Nintendo thing, even fan art. I heard of a case where I won't say who it was in case it's actually ongoing litigation situation. But there was a content creator who was making art based on a Nintendo series and got shut down, basically, because they were just, they were just making fan art, but they got totally shut down. And this, I mean, this is a very, it's, it's difficult because these aren't the same things. Like doing fan-inspired stuff around Nintendo properties is not the same as pirating for profit Nintendo's things.

But legally, as far as Nintendo's concerned, they do seem to see these things as analogous. And I think that's, that's a very unpopular view. And Nintendo's been notorious for, you know, like you'll see a YouTube video and a I'm a student and I've made like, I don't know, a trailer for a Metroid movie and then it'll get taken down. And it's like, really? Is that it doesn't see, it seems kind of almost hostile. Yeah. And it does come from this very strong, very strong legal basis of anti-piracy. But it goes, it goes, I think often too far with it to an extent that it makes itself very unpopular in certain kind of sections of the gaming community, particularly ones who are interested in emulation and modding. these are two things Nintendo's very anti, partly because it's still selling all these games from the 80s. Like, it's still selling them. You can still buy them, right?

Well, sort of. And that's the problem. I mean, look, I grew up buying Nintendo games, but when I went out to college and, you know, I had a PC. I started emulating Nintendo games because it was, you know, very easy to do so very early on, even like 2002.

You know, you could like emulate Super Nintendo games and Nintendo games. But part of the reason I was doing so was, like, well, you can play games that are no longer being sold or that were never available in the United States or, you know, eventually old hardware will break. Old, you know, old cartridges will become unavailable. And, you know, like movies, sure, you can just have a movie file somewhere and you can watch it on anything later. But video games, like, you need to have both the software and the hardware that runs it.

And so the existence of emulation is like important for. historical preservation. Nintendo's does not in fact sell every Nintendo game that has ever been made. There's plenty of games if you want to play them. You'd have to emulate them. You have no choice. Right. And like Nintendo, this is a, this is an issue across the games industry because

emulation is legally gray. It's, you know, under many definitions, it's illegal to emulate games. However, it's also doing nobody any harm in a lot of situations to emulate games. And there's also, there is a, as you very rightly point out, a preservation issue in that, you know, some insanely high percentage of. all games made in the 1980s cannot now be played. Like, it's almost impossible. It's the majority of games made at that time,

from all over the world in all ways, are now lost. And so people like the Game History Foundation and other video game history preservation people are trying to collect code and collect, like, an emulation has been a big part of this. It's actually been a part of preserving game history, and there are many, many games and consoles and companies that obviously haven't existed forever for decades, perhaps.

and then having kind of emulated versions of those things is a form of preservation. So it's one of those thorny, it's a legally thorny thing for a lot of game companies. And of course, like the ones that have a long history have a more complicated relationship with emulation. But in terms of preservation, it's an important side of preservation that's preserving the materials, the code, like the in-progress versions of games. The game history foundation goes into game developers and old shutdown game magazine. and stuff, and they just hoover up all these disks of, like, priceless stuff, you know, and all of that would otherwise be lost. But it's a complicated thing when you are, like, it's not, every now and then

a game comes out, because when I was, when I was a very nerdy kid, obviously, as maybe it may be clear from my choice of career. And I would sit and I would pour over these screenshots of SNES and N64 games that I would never play, because they were never going to be available to me, right? They were from Japan. They were never going to be released here. And then some of those games now only, exist as emulated copies somewhere. But the fact that they exist at all is down to these, you know, very dedicated communities of extremely technically literate modulators and, you know, and I think that those people have a lot to contribute to gaming history and preservation.

And that the complete like black and white absolutely knows analogous to piracy attitude that Nintendo has is not one that I think a lot of people in that community would share. Yeah. I mean, the fans and the broader community of people who love video games are sometimes the only people preserving these games at all. A perfect example of this. Yeah. A perfect example of this is Mother 3, which is a very famous example that I'll tell a little bit of this story. You can fill in any blanks that you like. But, you know, the never released in the U.S. sequel to Earthbound, otherwise knows Mother 2.

a very important game in video game history created by Shikasato, I think he's, he pronounced it, at toy. I'm just like a fan, I'm just a fan of him like as an artist. Like I have,

I buy his journal brand. I like read his writing. Like he's just an interesting guy. He's amazing, yeah. And like he made, he's made three video games, maybe four his entire life, but he's made three mother games.

One of them has never been released in the U.S. And like, the only reason anyone's ever played it in English is because fans for the past, I want to say, 10 to 15 years have been translating this game and figuring out ways to emulate it and make it easier to play. And Nintendo, I don't know if they've sued that project specifically, but certainly would not be supportive of any of this.

And I have no plans to ever release the game in English. And they've said repeatedly they will never do it. And so like, so what the fuck is the... Who's being harmed? Yeah. Yeah, who's being harmed by this? And like people, the, the only reason anybody wants to do any of this stuff is reverence for the thing that Nintendo has made is out of love and out of wanting to preserve the thing. And so when the company gets in the way and says, no, you're not allowed to do that.

We're in fact going to take you to court and try to ruin your life because you tried. Yeah, yeah. And some people's lives have been. some people's lives have been ruined by by Nintendo going after them um it's uh it's it's not good no it's not and you know it's it's also just dramatically unpopular because i think uh a lot of people see that kind of pres well is it preservation i don't know what you call it it's it's somewhere in the region of modding or but it's on it's on the continuum of fan art like it's a tribute you know yeah and uh we're talking sometimes we're talking about games here that have

and will never be making money for Nintendo right now. And, you know, the question is just like, again, who's being harmed? And, you know, I guess in, I guess it's, maybe it's too much to expect from any corporation, but the idea of just letting things slide because it's not harming anybody. Yeah. It doesn't seem, that's not something that Nintendo's lawyers appear to be familiar with as a concept. But maybe that's, maybe it's unfair to single Nintendo out for this. Maybe any corporate entity would have the same attitude.

But yeah, it is very disappointing from the perspective of people who are just trying to to make a cool thing that's related to it or, you know, that in some way would benefit other players, you know, would benefit gamers and people who are interested. I think Nintendo is remarkably litigious compared to many other companies. Like, it's up there with Disney, but there's many companies that do not protect their IPA, or take a deliberately permissive approach and say, hey, look, what fans do is like that, that benefits the overall project. Yeah, that's keeping them in the ecosystem.

Yeah, that's completely true. And I do wonder sometimes, because Nintendo has traditionally been. about 10 years slower than other companies in terms of embracing new ways of doing things. Like Nintendo very, very reluctantly kind of acknowledged the existence of the internet in about 2008. So I'm wondering if maybe in another 10 years it will be a different story and they'll just like very slowly catch up to somewhere where like Bethesda, who does Skyrim and, you know, fallout, where they're at, where they just let people do whatever, basically. I do wonder if maybe it will change a bit over time.

And, you know, there was a while when Nintendo wouldn't even let people, like, make YouTube videos of their games or stream their games because that was there as well. And they have moved on that. So I do wonder if maybe in another five, ten years, just glacially slowly, they might come around to a kind of more modern way of thinking about how fans and other people, like, interact with their stuff. Well, they've had decades to do it so far, and they haven't. Let's talk about the future, though, and end on that note. because, you know, in a world where everything is is insidifying, right, as Corey Doctro has told us about on this very show. And, you know, the media that we love appears to be collapsing in favor of a tech industry that's trying to centralize all eyeballs and dollars on itself. You know, these horrible tides that are pulling people and products under an entire industries.

how likely is it that you think the good things about Nintendo are able to survive and whether that's storm. I mean, I did say they haven't and shitified, and you said not yet. There's always a chance, isn't there? I mean, I see, do you know, do you know what really spooked me in a way was when Disney signed that contract with OpenAI over Sora?

And I was like, if Disney will do that, if Disney will do that, if they will literally allow some hard, horrible slop machine to have their characters and allow people to play with that. I mean, there's a universe in which Nintendo would do that. Right. Obviously, I think that deal like literally yesterday at the time of recording, that deal fell apart because Open AI has closed SORA down for reasons that I'm very interested to find

out about when some journalist tells me. I can speculate. I did a whole video on that. But, yeah, I mean, it made no sense from the jump, and it was very nice to see it all collapse. Yeah. Yeah, so there's a little bit of, well, a lot of Shadenfreude there. But my hope and my expectation, given just everything I know about Nintendo, which is obviously a lot now, is that they will continue being a weird little toy company operating in their weird little way.

Because they have managed to insulate themselves from the kind of broader vacillations of the tech industry, I've now seen in like 20 years as a games journalist, I've seen everybody go nuts over so many different things. Like a few years ago, it was the blockchain. Like every game was going to be blockchain, NFTs. Every game's going to be like NFTs. every game's going to be VR. It's going to be VR now. And that went and all of that was just bullshit. And, you know, a lot of people were like, this is bullshit all along.

And then it just takes a few years and all the investors get excited. And then they run away again and nothing's really changed, right? And I'm at the moment, AI is the big thing that everybody is worried about in the games world. Like will it essentially just enshittify video game development? And I really do. I just believe in my heart it's not going to happen. I wish I could say, like, I truly, like, for good, for good, you know, economic and political reasons, I don't think it's going to happen. But I just think it's because people love to make things. And video game developers are very opinionated, very creative, very technically. These are people who are, like, offended to their cores by the entire concept of AI, right? So I just don't think anybody, I think the people running games companies love it and are really into the idea of replacing people with that. I think everybody who makes video games is so, so, so.

anti it. And I think that, you know, whether at Nintendo or elsewhere, there's just such an enormous amount of resistance to this particular, you know, tech of the moment. So my hope and my expectation is that this won't happen that we wouldn't have like AI Mario in five years. I really don't think it's going to happen. There's an outside possibility, but I just don't think it's going to happen. I think Nintendo is insulated enough from the wider world to keep doing things its way. And the thing that I'm hoping for is that it preserves just the weird, weird Nintendo, like the weird side of it. Yeah.

The kind of non-shiny, like the weird depressed dog that you have within that baseball game, you know, that kind of side of Nintendo. The Nintendo that released a weird alarm clock that watches you while you sleep a couple of years ago. You know?

Yeah. The Nintendo that makes warrior wear and that makes, the license is electroplactant, which is a strange little like underwater synthesizer game for the DS. That Nintendo, I hope is still there and will, it'll not just be Mario and Zelda and Princess Peach and Donkey Kong forever.

I do hope that those, other sides of Nintendo will be preserved. And I think they're in as good positions as you can be, given just how everything is at the moment in the entertainment and tech and media industries. I think Nintendo's probably as insulated as you can be from the rest of it. So I'm cautiously optimistic, I think, about Nintendo's future. Not so much about the video games industry in general, but about Nintendo, I'm cautiously optimistic.

I feel like Nintendo knows deep down in its soul that it's like, yeah, AI, blockchain, things come and go. You know what's forever? cart. 100%. You take anybody and you say, you want to play Mario Kart? They don't need to have played any other video game in their life. They're like, yeah, I like Mario Kart.

I won't play Mario Kart. And they can turn on whatever Nintendo console is out. They can turn on Mario Kart. And you know what? Drifting will work about the same way. But there will be something new about it that people love. There'll be a cow. There'll be a cow that everyone obsesses over as there is a Merri-Card.

Exactly. And they draw people in. Look, they'll make a new Mario Brothers movie, which, sure, those movies are nostalgic cash grabs in many ways. But what do they do? My friend's son, who, you know, loves that movie and got into the, you know, the sort of big funnel part of it, now is playing Zelda games and is obsessed with Zelda. And I'm like, this kid is getting a real video game experience, right? Yes. He was drawn to having a real art experience at the age of like seven, which is like, that's what got me into this.

That's what created a lot of who I am, is having those real art experiences as a child that were foundational. And I see them doing that with new generations. And I hope that they continue it. And if they don't, and, you know, they do and shittify, which could happen. You know, there'll be just a little light will have extinguished on planet Earth, I think. Well, we'll always have Super Mario Brothers three if that does happen. I think fundamentally humans really like good things. things. And the other thing that's vital and that I think about a lot at the moment because things feel

really, what is truth that so many have forgotten? Humans like good things. Yeah. We've got taste. Humans have taste, man. And also, we're playful animals. It's really important, especially when everything feels terrible, which obviously it does a lot of the time at the moment, to keep space for play. You've got to keep space for play and joy in your heart. However, that comes to you. And for me, the video games are a big part of like the joy and the playfulness that I managed to keep space for in my life. Yes. We're always going to need that, especially now, like especially now. Keza, thank you so much for coming on the show.

The name of the book, which I'm sure everyone is going to want to read. This to me, by the way, this is a perfect audio book book book. I think I'm going to be chilling out with this. I'm going to get a copy at Libro.fm. But of course, if you want to get a copy of it on paper, you can do it at our special bookshop, factuallypod.com slash books. The name of the book is Super Nintendo, the game-changing company that unlocks the power of play. Where else can people find you on the internet?

You can find me on Blue Sky. and I also, I'm the video games editor for The Guardian newspaper. So I write a weekly newsletter called Pushing Buttons, which you can also sign up to. I would love to, I'm going to go sign up for it right now. Kesa, thank you so much for coming on the show. Tremendous. Thank you.

It was a pleasure. Well, thank you once again to Kesa for coming on the show. Again, if you want to pick up a copy of her book, factuallypod.com slash books, you can support not just this show, but your local bookstore as well. If you want to support the show directly, head to patreon.com, Adam Con over five bucks a month. Gets you every episode of the show ad-free for

$15 a month. I will read your name in the credits and put it in the credits of every single one of my video monologues. This week, I want to thank Christina Quaranta, Issa Carpenter, Troy Stiffler, Fokkreden, Ibrugamov, Yuri Lowenthal,

and thanks for a great show at Punchline SF. Hey, thank you, thanks for a great show at Punchline SF, for coming and for supporting the show. If you want me to read your name or username that is actually, in fact, a message to me and the rest of the audience, you can put anything you want in that box and I will read it on the show.

Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. We'd love to have you. Of course, if you want to come see me in Sacramento, California, La Jolla, California, Chicago, Illinois, April 18th at the Den Theater, Kansas City, Missouri, and to Adam Conover.net for all those tickets. I want to thank my producer, Sam Rodman and Tony Wilson.

Everybody here at HeadGum for making the show possible. Thank you so much for listening. We're going to see you next time on Factually. That was a HeadGum podcast. Hi, I am Mandy Moore. Sterling K. Brown. And I'm Chris Sullivan. And we host the podcast, That Was Us, now on HeadGum.

Each episode, we're going to go into a deep dive from our show, This Is Us. That's right. We're going to go episode by episode. We're also going to pepper in episodes with different guest stars and writers and casting directors. Are we going to cry? Yes, a little bit. Are we going to laugh? A lot.

A whole lot. That's what I'm hoping, man. Listen to That Was Us on your favorite podcast app or watch full video episodes on YouTube or Spotify, new episodes every Tuesday.