How Nintendo Won With Old Technology

Lateral thinking with withered technology

“After we released the Game Boy, one of my staff came to me with a grim expression on his face: ‘There’s a new handheld on the market similar to ours…’ The first thing I asked was, ‘Is it a color screen, or monochrome?’ He told me it was color, and I reassured him, ‘Then we’re fine.’”

— Gunpei Yokoi

For many of us, Nintendo is inseparable from our childhood. We spent so much time with their games, it almost became a language for us. Our parents likely couldn’t understand a word we were saying as we blabbed on about Super Mario, Kid Icarus, or some woman named Zelda, who we never got to see.

Despite Nintendo’s importance to our childhood brains, we were missing something back then. We saw it as just a game. However, there was so much more in Nintendo we couldn’t grasp at the time; there was philosophy, business strategy, and history unfolding before our very eyes.

Nintendo wasn’t a game system. It was a way of thinking so all-encompassing, it transformed a small playing card maker into a giant known by adults and children all over the world. Moreover, this philosophy was created by a man who society gave little chance of success.