Not as innocent as you thought
What can one say about the big N? They're that celestial constant in the gaming solar system, there from the beginning and lasting till the end, from their halls have hailed some of the most classic franchises ever to grace this Earth, and their influence on the art of game design is second to none. Whenever you pick up a modern game you can practically feel their influence imbued in the very stones. Such a wonderous body are they. Like a magnificent father. If only we all could be so grossly incandescent. Thus it's hardly a surprise to anyone that when a docu-series is going to made out of a games company, they would be the obvious choice. The only other might be Atari, but theirs is a story that feels covered to death; I think we'd all appreciate something fresh. And as the trailer for 'Playing with Power: The Nintendo Story' dictates; we know the name, but we don't know the whole story. (Personally I'd call that heavily into question, I really do know an obscene amount about Nintendo's past, including a great many things I can assure you won't be in the documentary. But sure, tease away.)
Firstly, I was surprised that this documentary had the gall to tease Nintendo's pre-gaming origin of making 'playing cards' as they say. Yeah, playing cards. 'Scuse me friend, but being an aficionado of Kiryu and Majima's bloodless journeys around Japan, I recognise Hanafuda cards when I see them. So let me pre-empt the fact that this documentary is going to gloss over the single most interesting part of Nintendo's history, by telling you the real origins of Nintendo. (If you don't know this story, then hold on because this is about to get wild) So Hanafuda is a game that utilises special playing cards that feature no numbers but rather have images on them. Images are matched thematically in order to create a collection which scores points, and it's this whole thing. It's harder to explain than it is to play, however, I assure you. Hanafuda isn't the only game that you can play with these cards, there's also Koi-Koi (Which is fun because you get to shout "Koi" when you're winning) and so many others that I can't be bothered to get into right now. They were also created as a loophole for organised crime.
Okay, maybe that's being a little dramatic. As it happens the Yakuza got really big into card gambling about a century and a bit back and though it made them a lot of money, it naturally drew in a lot of the other vices that criminal organisations tended to attract. At some point regulations were drawn to limit the spread of gambling, and that which naturally followed, but the effect was... mitigated through the wily wills of whoever it was that invented Hanafuda cards. Whilst other playing cards seemed easy enough to slap a ban on, Hanafuda cards seemed too abstract to gamble with, so the government left it alone. But where there's a will there's a way and thematic matching images and themes to create matches that confer to a pre-established point value is how the game is played now, so I assume that's how they did it back then. I'm not an expert though, don't quote me on that. However, as it turns out when you have an entire card game that is mainly popular among those who want to partake in illegal gambling, i.e. Gokudō, suddenly most legitimate card companies don't want anything to do with it. (Weird how that works out.)
Or at least, that's how you end up seeing things if you're a little baby boy. Not Fusajirō Yamauchi, however. That man just looked at the demand and say "What are ya all idiots or something? That there's what we call a gap in the market, if allaya big cowardly chickens ain't got the guts then I guess it's time I showed everyone how it's dun" (I might possibly be paraphrasing. Or making that entire dialogue up altogether) The point is he opened up a little shop called 'Nintendo Koppai' and sold the absolute heck out of those Hanafuda cards, ensuring that the Japanese Yakuza would have plenty of materials with which to popularise their gambling rings for generations to co- woah, wait a second. That almost sounds like I'm trying to say that Nintendo very much got it's start as a company due to a symbiotic relationship with the Yakuza... put that in your little propaganda documentary...
Of course, that couldn't remain the case forever. And as we sit today, with Nintendo as the oldest still existing video game company, (technically, although Atari was arguably in the gaming market before them, Nintendo was around longer) they're completely family friendly and have reformed their image. And we all just handily forget how it was Yakuza ties that allowed them to diversify and grow into a staple around all of Japan because it's convenient to. (Although, remembering how draconian Nintendo gets about their IPs, you do see glimmers of that no-nonsense hard-criminal spine every now and then) But just because Nintendo are all 'squeaky clean' now doesn't mean that I don't have any more stories that these guys definitely won't put in their documentary, have no doubt about that!
What about that time when Nintendo lost the rights to what would become the biggest and most influential RPG of all time? (Note: I didn't say JRPG, because I suppose that would be Dragon Quest) You see, Nintendo's stubborn insistence on sticking to cartridge based systems when disc drives were available began to become a real problem for a little studio called Square. I could write a whole blog about the many other little knives that wedged into this relationship, but that was really the core issue that kept being drawn up. After it was decided by the team that they wanted to move forward with the tech and memory at their fingertips, Square ended up moving their game to Playstation. This betrayal left Nintendo to put the screws on a another studio they had under the belt to get an RPG out of them, but that led to strained relationships (and apparently rampant miscommunication) that led to that studio and Nintendo parting ways. (That farewell might have also had something to do with said developer making a very murder-heavy game in the middle of Nintendo's most puritanical days.) That game Square was working on? It was Final Fantasy 7. And that studio Nintendo drove off? DMA Design, later to become Rockstar North. (Double whammy. That's the kind of missed opportunity that'd keep me up at night.)
All of this isn't to say that I dislike Nintendo. Or at least, not most of the time anyway. They're still a bastion of the gaming world to whom I hold a great amount of reverence. And I'll count them among the only big game makers in the world that have a consistent track record of delivering polished and mostly high-quality gaming experiences every single year. And that's not just from pumping out so many games that they hit jackpots; the philosophies the company runs by and espouses seem to be diamond for the development process, as their games are usually incredibly well put together. They are the company to whom I owe Zelda as well, which means there's no end to the amount of creative dividends I owe them because Zelda's legacy is pretty much my entire world.
I just like to poke and point fun every now and then, especially when a 'family friendly' documentary rears it's head with the gall to try and pretend like it's going to blow my very perception of Nintendo out the water. Sorry guys, Nintendo themselves already did that. To think, a century ago their space would be packed-up with tough tatted Yakuza soldiers all-day and now they're opening up a 'Super Nintendo World' for kids in Universal. How the winds of fortune do be changing. It's just a wonder why Nintendo doesn't remember it roots enough to let Ryū ga Gotoku onto their storefronts. Come on guys, pay your spiritual predecessors some respect!
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