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David Sheff

Game over: How Nintendo Zapped an American Industry, Captured Your Dollars, & Enslaved Your Children Hardcover – January 1, 1993

by David Sheff (Author)

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A chronicle of Nintendo's quick climb to the top of the global video game market describes the company's tactics and how they have been used in the last decade to help Nintendo become one of the most successful high-tech companies in the world. 50,000 first printing. $50,000 ad/promo.

Language

English
Publisher

Diane Pub Co
Publication date

January 1, 1993
Dimensions

6.25 x 1.5 x 9.25 inches
ISBN-10

0788163205
ISBN-13

978-0788163203
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Blake J. Harris
1,259
Paperback
67 offers from $3.18
Jane McGonigal
791
Paperback
128 offers from $2.04

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Diane Pub Co (January 1, 1993)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0788163205
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0788163203
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.75 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.25 x 1.5 x 9.25 inches

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David Sheff

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DAVID SHEFF's books include Game Over, China Dawn, and All We Are Saying. His many articles and interviews have appeared in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Playboy, Wired, Fortune, and elsewhere. His piece for the New York Times Magazine, My Addicted Son, won an award from the American Psychological Association for Outstanding Contribution to Advancing the Understanding of Addiction. It led to his #1 New York Times Best Seller, Beautiful Boy, which was named the best nonfiction book of 2008 by Entertainment Weekly. Beautiful Boy was also an Amazon Best Book of 2008. Sheff and his family live in Inverness, California.

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Douglas E Bernard Jr

Four Stars

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 11, 2017

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Very good, easy read about Nintendo's entry into the U.S. console market

One person found this helpful

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Britania

thiss book is great ;)

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 28, 2013

Verified Purchase

i luv this book so much i can stop reading thanks for writing it:), i'll make sure to recommed you.

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Frequent Contributor

A fascinating look at Nintendo, and the video game industry in general...

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 12, 2012

Just finished reading this great book, and thought I'd offer my thoughts for those wondering about Game Over. First of all, this book is a gold mine of insanely interesting information for Nintendo fans, and for video game fans in general. Aside from a recounting a huge chunk of Nintendo's history (up through 1992...), this book delves into the rise and fall of Atari and it's creator Nolan Bushnell, the history of arcade games, Electronic Arts, Tetris, and Nintendo's double cross that led to one of it's biggest rivals: Playstation.

This book primarily covers Nintendo's rise as a toy company in the '60s and '70s through becoming a gaming juggernaut in the early '90s, although there are some early chapters about Nintendo's beginnings in the late 1800s, which are interesting.

What's most interesting about this book is all of the crazy things that have happened throughout their history. Some of my favorites are the "accidental" creation of the massive arcade hit Donkey Kong, when Universal Studios sued Nintendo over copyright infringement because of Donkey Kong's similarities to "King Kong" (which turns out to be an INSANE story...), the story of Atari, Nintendo basically controlling the videogame industry with an iron fist for years and years, and how one guy basically tried to steal Tetris from the Russian government over and over again and ended up getting screwed, himself... Nearly every aspect of this book is jam-packed with the kind of plot twists and characters and victories that would fit right in on an epic film or celebrated novel, and it's all true. I'd highly recommend this title to Nintendo fans, obviously, and anyone who grew up playing games or who plays games now and wonders where the industry started, basically. Also, people interested in business practices and court cases, in general, will get a kick out of all the courtroom and boardroom follies in the book.

With all that glowing praise, however, I do have to acknowledge a few flaws with the book. Almost immediately you'll notice that the author David Sheff seems to have no working knowledge of video games. I'll chalk it up to the fact that he was an adult when the whole industry started, so he sort of "missed" playing them, but it definitely shows as a weakness in his writing about the topic, 20 years after the book's release. Now, I wouldn't expect a reporter writing about cocaine addiction to become an addict, but you'd probably want someone writing about surfing to have surfed once or twice... There are just a lot of cringe-inducing passages about games and game-lingo that he's making up in the early chapters and towards the end that don't ring true.

Also, apparently portions of the book were originally written as magazine articles. It mentions 3 different articles, which I assume became chapters of the book which he filled out, but it might explain why the book jumps around in time, so much. Eventually I got used to it, but Sheff will be explaining how Shigeru Miyamoto created Donkey Kong (for example) in one chapter, and he'll jump past the important parts fairly quickly. Then, two chapters later, after he's already been talking about the NES in the late '80s, he'll jump BACK to the early '80s to fill in more information about Donkey Kong. And the whole book is written that way. Sheff will mention something offhand that Nintendo fans will recognize as important to the history of the company, but zip right by it, and then jump back to talking about it a few chapters later. By the end of the book, he had ended up creating quite a few redundancies by jumping around so much... Now, I'll credit the method by saying that with so many different people to focus on, eventually it probably made more sense to cover each one separately to give better coverage to the important players as they came into the story, but the introduction of NOA founder Minoru Arakawa, in particular, feels out of place, because the book jumps from having already extensively covered the Japanese NES launch all the way back to the 1970s to introduce him before he even worked for Nintendo. Primarily, it's just difficult to keep track of the various timelines running simultaneously throughout the various portions of the book.

Also problematic are a few of the final chapters, which butt up against what was then the glistening present date of 1992-93. Sheff changes gears from covering history fairly brilliantly to buying into the hype machine of the present/future, and attempts - poorly - to predict Nintendo's next moves. Sheff basically says that PC's won't ever catch on because they'd been beaten by home videogame systems, that "multimedia" will become the biggest thing EVER (I remember in the early '90s when everyone was talking about multimedia, which was always basically just an encyclopedia on a CD-ROM with sound and video, and nobody ever really wanted it...), etc. He wrongly assumes that the Sony/Nintendo partnership will get along just fine (instead of Sony becoming one of N's biggest rivals...), and that Nintendo would be jumping to CD-based games soon (instead of seven years later...). So there are two chapters towards the end regarding multimedia and the failed "Nintendo Network" (basically the internet...) that are hard to get through after what was up until that point a poignant history of a fairly bloodthirsty company.

The final chapters put away the haughty predictions and get back to the characters we've come to know and admire, and the book ends on an upbeat note.

Aside from a few factual errors regarding minor things (game titles and other things that might simply be mis-translations), the few negatives I mentioned are barely enough to make anyone not want to pick up this book. The story is fast-paced and exciting, and I wish there was an updated version through 2012, from which I'm writing this review... There is a paperback version of the book released in 1999 that has some further chapters detailing the Nintendo 64 years, but they're obviously not included in this original hardback printing. I imagine they're worth a read, as well.

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Debra Hunter

Relevancy Can't Disguise a Possible Cash Grab!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 7, 2018

This title caught my eye because, I figured this would still be relevant. How could it not be when Nintendo has millions ,maybe billions, of fans worldwide, even with the additions of Nintendo Labo (it's a cardboard controller) and The Great Detective Pikachu (the trailer's so subpar)? So, I was interested...until I read the front flap. I got the impression that the author doesn't even like video games.

Speaking of that, it's noteworthy to bring up Hiroshi Yamauchi's feelings about them. Not because they're the same, that would explain why Nintendo's early games are so bad, they might as well be published by ljn! (If you've watched Angry Video Game Nerd, or AVGN for short, you'll know what I'm talking about.) In fact, I asked my father why he tried to keep us away from Nintendo from we were younger. He said that they were bad and expensive. To be fair, I can't blame him after learning how much the Dragon Quest first sold for. That and out of all the Nintendo games I've played, only Pokemon games, Pet Vet: Healing Hands, Animal Crossing: Wild World, New Leaf, and HM: Tale of Two Towns have kept my attention for more than a few weeks. That's because they're repetitious to the point of being monotonous. Granted, Omega Ruby and Sun were exceptions because, I've played all three of the original games, and even beat Emerald Version. The latter game went from being fun to somewhat challenging to frustrating.

That aside, this raised a couple of questions. The first was when the author wondered how much hand eye coordination someone even needs. That was one of the dumbest questions I've ever read because, the last time I checked, that was used for everything ranging from jobs to everyday tasks, such as writing. That made me wonder: Did he not do anything research for the sake of a weak counterargument? (Please keep in mind that even though this was published in the early 90's, some people and places had computers.)

Next, was when the author was describing Altered Beast. It started out fine because, it was accurate. However, he then called the creatures you transform into revolting. How did that seem the slightest bit necessary when the creatures don't even look that bad? Please keep in mind that one notable system was the Sega Genesis so of course there would be limitations.

On another note, I enjoyed learning about the personal relationships (to an extent), and successes of the company. I even enjoyed learning about Hatris because, that was to show some people (read: opponents) that just because, it's a video game doesn't mean it needs to be violent. However, I can't overlook the myriad struggles and old business practices.

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Game over: How Nintendo Zapped an American Industry, Captured Your Dollars, & Enslaved Your Children Hardcover – January 1, 1993

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