Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America [Hardcover]

Jeff Ryan (Author)

Book Description

Release date: August 4, 2011

The story of Nintendo's rise and the beloved icon who made it possible.

Nintendo has continually set the standard for video-game innovation in America, starting in 1981 with a plucky hero who jumped over barrels to save a girl from an ape.

The saga of Mario, the portly plumber who became the most successful franchise in the history of gaming, has plot twists worthy of a video game. Jeff Ryan shares the story of how this quintessentially Japanese company found success in the American market. Lawsuits, Hollywood, die- hard fans, and face-offs with Sony and Microsoft are all part of the drama.

Find out about:

* Mario's eccentric yet brilliant creator, Shigeru Miyamoto, who was tapped for the job because was considered expendable.

* Minoru Arakawa, the son-in-law of Nintendo's imperious president, who bumbled his way to success. * The unexpected approach that allowed Nintendo to reinvent itself as the gaming system for the non-gamer, especially now with the Wii Even those who can't tell a Koopa from a Goomba will find this a fascinating story of striving, comeuppance, and redemption.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The history of how a Japanese video game featuring two Italian brothers became one of America's favorite pastimes is covered in exhaustive, enthusiastic detail by video game reviewer Ryan. The author takes readers through Nintendo's early business machinations; the story of Mario's eccentric creator, Shigeru Miyamoto; and the game-changing emergence of Nintendo's motion controller for the Wii, with a breezy journalistic style. At times the tone slips into the white hat–black hat morality employed in most video games, often painting Nintendo's business competitors or detractors with broad reductive strokes—"hardcore gamers sneer at Wii"—and paeans to new Nintendo releases get smattered with exclamation points, so that some pages read like Nintendo promo material. All of this is distracting but not fatal, and the book is a thorough history of Nintendo's victories, written by an enthusiastic and knowledgeable fan. (Aug.)

About the Author

Jeff Ryman, a lifelong gamer, has been featured on Salon.com and All Things Considered. He reviewed over 500 video games and covered four console launches as the games editor for Katrillion, a popular dotcom-era news and entertainment Web site. He lives in Bloomfield, New Jersey.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover (August 4, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1591844053
• ISBN-13: 978-1591844051
• Product Dimensions: 6.3 x 1 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #279,163 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

34 of 37 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Super Mario August 11, 2011

By KingGeorge24

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

The best part of this book, by far, is the cover. It's an arresting piece of artwork for anyone who grew up with a Nintendo: Mario paused in mid-jump, a perfectly Nintendo shade of blue wallpapered behind him. It's an image that promises more than the book offers.

The writing is clean and straightforward but far too often Ryan resorts to pop culture jokes (the intro to Sonic the Hedgehog is particularly brutal) or cultural stereotypes (in the section detailing with the creation of the first Mario arcade game are the inevitable references to yin and yang and Japanese Zen). It's a style that should be familiar to anyone who's read Wired magazine. There are also a few spelling errors sprinkled throughout the book, nothing terrible, although Konami is referred to as Komani.

As a history of Nintendo it's a worthy primer but don't expect anything as in-depth or meticulously researched as David Sheff's "Game Over: How Nintendo Conquered the World," from which "Super Mario" paraphrased a cover image and a subtitle. "Game Over" was a video game book but also a business book. At nearly 500 pages it offered a level of detail and character necessary to understand the under-scrutinized subject. Ryan too often focuses on the trivial and skates by the interesting; multiple page bios on historical footnotes like Captain Lou Albano and Billy Mitchell yet a single paragraph of background on Shigeru Miyamoto. For a more compelling look at the history of Nintendo and Miyamato, I'd first refer one to "Game Over" and "Master of Play" by Nick Paumgarten from the New Yorker.

Ryan's greatest mistake is in his disregard for any description of the actual act of playing video games. There's never any sense of what it's like to hold a controller in one's hands and play a game. Although it's safe to assume that most everyone who reads this book will have played most of the games described within, there is something missing to a book that covers such an intensely interactive activity without any mention of what it's like to participate. It's like writing a book about football and never describing what happens on the field. The other recent mainstream book about video games, last year's "Extra Lives" by Tom Bissell, details the peculiar mix of immersion and passivity that goes into playing video games as does Nicholson Baker's "Painkiller Deathstreak" from the New Yorker magazine.

It's been nearly twenty years since Sheff's book and since then there's been an explosion of innovation and expansion in the video game industry, largely undocumented by anyone other than industry trade magazines and online publications. Ryan's book is good video game journalism, but it needs to be better than that. It needs to be good journalism.

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Suitable for non-gamers October 2, 2011

By M. Lin

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I am rarely moved to share my opinions on things, but there's a lot about this book that I can't keep quiet about.
As far as the content of the book, I agree with what other reviewers have said in that the author's telling of Nintendo's history up until about the SNES, at most N64 era, is the book's strongest. For Nintendo's history after that, you're not much better off than asking a Gamestop employee for it. As for this writing style, I also felt he was trying too hard to be hip and witty and detracted from the book. To call a past Japanese NOA president "Grandpa Ojisan" (Grandpa grandpa?) and then Reggie Fils-Aime "Will Smith" was about as funny as a Hiroshima joke. But that's his writing style and I've already bought the book, and that's not what really bothered me.
What really irked me with this book is the misinformation. This book seems more like a 200 page wikipedia entry than a published work. A few mistakes is forgivable but the amount this book has makes me wonder who proof-read it. For being written by a 'life-long gamer' and focusing on Nintendo, it's amazing how he can misspell the system that was the catalyst for video games throughout the whole book - the Famicom (FAMily COMputer) not Famicon. Also, it's the DSLL (or DSXL), not DSX (it's still on store shelves for crying out loud). There's also a lot of other wrong info and misspellings, but a few standouts were claiming the original PSP had 16gb of memory built in, that the Xbox 360 and PS3 both required $100 of extra charges to play online at launch, that the original Pokemon's types were fire, water and ice (assuming he was referring to Charmander, Squirtle and Bulbasaur) or claiming that both Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest were made by Square during the N64 era.
All in all, it seems the only explanation would be that the author did much of his research with current facts, that the author wrote a history book without actually knowing too much of video game history.
This book might be ok for readers not so in-the-know about video games, but if you want more solid facts I would highly suggest reading David Scheff's "Game Over" (I believe he has an updated edition, but the original goes up to about 1993) and the recently published Nintendo Magic by Osamu Inoue. Although those two books will be at least double, maybe triple the current $16 buy-in on this book, at least you'll have real information.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Terrible, full of misinformation September 10, 2012

By Nicholas J. Castellina

Format:Hardcover

The author obviously did zero research when putting this together. As other reviewers have mentioned, it is full of inaccuracies. I know it sounds nitpicky, but the author consistently calls the "Famicom" the "Famicon". (Also repeatedly refers to "Konami" as "Komani". Here are a few examples of facts that are incorrectly stated:

1. There is a princess at the end of every four levels in Super Mario Bros.
2. You have to push a button to use the hammer in Donkey Kong
3. Bowser is the end boss in the United States' Super Mario Bros. 2.

I've heard most of the stories in this book, so it wasn't too much of an issue to me, but it makes me wonder if the things I didn't know were completely inaccurate. Additionally, for some reason people like Billy Mitchell and Captain Lou Albano get more thorough biographies than Shigeru Miyamoto.

This is just a really poor effort, and it pains me that there are so few books about Nintendo history that something like this may endure and give misinformation to future generations.