Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [6]
Arakawa was able to wheel and deal about a thousand of the Radar Scope units, breaking even on production and shipping costs. But Yamauchi had sent him three thousand. Now two thousand of them were collecting dust in a warehouse in New Jersey, aging about as well as unrefrigerated milk. This was exactly why Yoko, who was now a three-pack-a-day smoker, hadn’t wanted her husband to go into business with her father.
It hardly seemed a success. Certainly not to Ron and Al back in Seattle, who were getting killed by their commission-based deal on an expensive game. What could Arakawa do to prove himself to his father-in-law? Keep selling it, to even more diminishing returns? Or write off the loss and move on to next year’s models? Yamauchi might fire him for either decision. He had plenty of experience canning his own relatives: back in 1949, Yamauchi fired first his relatives, then every last executive, to remove all institutional memory of anyone but himself in charge. To avoid their fate, what should Arakawa choose?
There was a third option: Arakawa could preemptively resign, to keep his dignity intact. But this wasn’t Japan, where the samurai’s wakizashi sword was a constant metaphor for reclaiming one’s honor after a loss. This was America, the land where the breakfast flake, the ice cream cone, the microwave, and the Post-it note were all botched engineering projects salvaged into worldwide sensations. Failure, not necessity, was the mother of invention. Arakawa had an idea, a cavalier and audacious one—something that would never fly in Japan. Even if the new plan didn’t work, though, it would be a game changer.
2 – MARIO’S ARTIST
SHIGERU MIYAMOTO AND THE CREATION OF DONKEY KONG
Minoru Arakawa, a little Mino in a big pond, can’t be blamed for failing to break into the arcade game market. It was tough enough for American companies such as Exidy or Cinematronics to compete with the Atari juggernaut, especially since Atari had huge crews of employees churning out hit game after hit game, thousands of cabinets at a time. And Atari was now owned by Warner Communications, meaning it had pockets $100 million deep. Arakawa had no way of knowing he would defeat Nintendo’s eight-hundred-pound gorilla of a competitor with his own eight-hundred-pound gorilla.
One of Arakawa’s stumbling blocks was in trying to sell games himself. The way most Japanese game makers got their games into American arcades was by licensing them to U.S. firms. Both Namco’s Pac-Man and Taito’s Space Invaders were released in America by the same company: Midway. (Midway’s name came from the carnival midway, not the Battle of Midway, presumably a sore spot for Japan.) Nintendo had grown profitable in Japan by controlling distribution, and Yamauchi wanted to be his own distributor in America as well. That gave Arakawa two different challenges to overcome: come up with a game to sell, and keep the middlemen out of it.
Neither challenge looked surmountable at present. Nintendo could only deliver cabinets to arcades if it sold them first. The arcade business was entirely cash based, run by vendors so sleazy that towns regularly tried to chase them out adult bookstore – style. Arcades were considered one step away from circus life, and not a step up. It was no stretch to suppose that games made their way into arcades on something other than merit.
Japanese game makers were used to this—they dealt with Yakuza knockoffs of their games often enough, after all. This was yet another reason for Yamauchi to want a distribution network: if he had the power, no one else could touch Nintendo for fear of reprisals. So he was willing to hear out Arakawa, who called up, laid out the facts, then proposed his game-changing solution.
Fact: Radar Scope wasn’t going to sell any more units. Fact: To keep Ron and Al from walking away, Arakawa had promised them that the next Nintendo game would be a smash. Fact: They needed a new game to sell. Fact: despite adding words such as “explosive,