Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [29]
How to break in? If Mario really was Odysseus, questing away forever, maybe Homer had the answer to Yamauchi ’s problem as well. The Greeks gave their rivals the Trojans a big wooden horse as a surrender gift. The Trojans took it inside their fortress—and out poured the Greeks. All Nintendo had to do to sell their video game system . . . was to hide it.
Gunpei Yokoi was tasked with designing a twentieth-century Trojan horse. It was a foot-tall robot that could move its head and arms, pivot, and pick up certain objects. It was the Robotic Operating Buddy, or R.O.B. R.O.B. wasn’t that functional: only two lackluster games were designed that used him, Gyromite and Stack-Up. But R.O.B. made the video game console a robot that happened to come with an accessory that worked as a video game system. Toy stores sold robots no problem. And, Nintendo ported over its recent arcade hits like Duck Hunt and Hogan’s Alley complete with the Zapper, a light-gun peripheral.
American audiences must have been familiar with Homer. Toy stores once again rejected the console (again rechristened: it was now the Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES, with a sleek gray makeover), even with the robot and the gun. It was a pretty lousy ruse: toy manufacturers weren’t dolts, and knew a game console when they saw one.
Arakawa thought this was Nintendo of America’s end, and wanted to pull out. One company could only be so lucky: refurnishing Radar Scope, winning the Universal lawsuit, and making a ton of money in a scant three years was enough. Arakawa had opened up a successful Chuck E. Cheese in Vancouver, and then two other restaurants. Maybe resurrecting the home video game market wasn’t worth it. He was at heart a contented person, satisfied with his victories so far.
Yamauchi was not, at heart, happy. He always wanted more and bigger success, a curse peculiar to captains of industry. If American chains weren’t buying, Nintendo would start trotting the damn things door to door. The machine sold in Japan, after all, and it would sell in the United States if someone had the guts to realize one bad year did not make all video game systems Kryptonite. Games were huge in Japan, huge in Europe—hell, huge in Canada still. Even in the United States, arcades were still doing okay. Kids still played (and bought) games for the Commodore 64. The market was ready, the product was ready: he just needed to convince the idiot retailers.
Yamauchi had a hundred thousand NES units shipped to a warehouse in Hackensack, New Jersey, and had most of his American staff move out there as well. That fall of 1985, they’d hand sell as many systems to as many toy stores, electronics shops, and department stores in the New York City area as they could. The Manhattan-based toy manufacturers would notice all the local toy shops were stocking the NES. They’d see that it sold. They’d get the message, and start buying it on a national level. That was the plan.
Arakawa raised Yamauchi’s bet: any unsold Nintendo Entertainment System, he promised retailers, could be returned for full value. No retailer could lose a dime by stocking the NES, just floor space. Yamauchi had refused to offer such a guarantee—why don’t you just cut the price in half, or stuff the machine with twenty-dollar bills?—but Arakawa went behind his father-in-law’s back and made the promise. A desperate measure, for a desperate time. His small team worked nonstop every waking hour to set up holiday displays in toy stores. If this didn’t work, to quote Bill Paxton from that year’s Aliens, “Game over, man.” For their effort, they were rewarded by having their Seattle flight back home for Christmas cancelled due to fog.
As with Radar Scope, the NES sold some but nowhere near all of its units for the Christmas rush. Fifty thousand units out the door wasn’t