Game Over: How Nintendo Zapped an American Industry, Captured Your Dollars, and Enslaved Your Children

Product Description

A chronicle of Nintendo’s climb to the top of the video game market describes the company’s tactics and how it has become one of the most successful high tech companies in the world

From Publishers Weekly

Despite its title, this overlong book is a generally admiring look at the operation and history of Nintendo, Japan’s most successful company and the maker of that country’s most lucrative cultural export. Given broad access to the videogame company’s executives, Sheff ( The Playboy Interviews with John Lennon and Yoko Ono ) examines Nintendo’s humble origins and growth. He recounts its gutsy entry into the U.S. market, its bruising tactics against competitors, its marketing brilliance and the controversy over its recent purchase of the Seattle Mariners baseball team. Unfortunately, Sheff’s chronicle is choppy, overwhelmed by an excess of superfluous details and scene-setting, and weakened by his attempt to incorporate other computer-industry stories, such as that of the fall of Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, into the narrative. Illustrations not seen by PW. Author tour.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Using extensive interviews with Nintendo executives in Japan, America, and Europe, Sheff, a magazine reporter, gives a narrative account of the swift rise of the Japanese company from the early Eighties to the present. This well-written book examines what has made this company–which has $4.7 billion in annual sales in America alone–so successful and pervasive. It loads 16 chapters with sales totals, market shares, and sweeping comparisons with IBM, Apple, and Disney in an attempt to get inside the workings of this relentlessly competitive high-tech business. In nonacademic and nontechnical language, this book does a good job of exploring Nintendo’s planning, R & D and engineering, product development, market penetration and development, Japanese business methods, software development, arrival in America and legal issues, business with the Russians, worldwide competition, and plans for staking out the future. Filled with absorbing human anecdotes, this refreshing work is recommended not only for specialized business readers but for anyone curious to learn about the flourishing Nintendo organization. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/1/92.

– Joseph W. Leonard, Miami Univ., Oxford, Ohio
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

An exhaustive, gung-ho progress report on Japan’s Nintendo, the transnational enterprise that bestrides the expanding market for computer/video games like a colossus. Drawing on what appears to be open-door access to corporate brass, freelance journalist Sheff (Playboy, Rolling Stone, etc.) provides a thorough rundown on the Kyoto-based company, which for much of its 103-year history had trouble surviving in the humdrum playing-card business. Credit for the family firm’s dramatic breakout goes to Hiroshi Yamauchi, who first took Nintendo into electronic toys and then (as the state of the semiconductor art permitted) into ever more dazzling high-tech diversions–notably, the immensely popular Mario Bros. series of games. By Sheff’s tellingly detailed account, the ultracompetitive CEO cajoled, inspired, or browbeat a small cadre of talented engineers and programmers into creating products that yielded pretax profits approximating $1.25 billion on sales exceeding $4.3 billion in fiscal-year 1992. While rivals scramble to keep pace with the industry’s top gun, Nintendo could, Sheff argues, cash in on the commercial potential of its installed hardware base, now devoted solely to fun and games. At last count, roughly two-fifths and one- third, respectively, of the households in Japan and the US owned one or more of the company’s playback systems. The design of these machines is such that most models could be incorporated into networks with interactive capabilities (banking, bill-paying, retrieval of information from dat