Balloon Fight (***)
by [name redacted]
Time was, Nintendo was a company was a game. Then Mario was a commodity was a template was a cult.
The guy who dragged Japan’s oldest hanafuda manufacturer into videogame design was a quiet, oddball toy inventor named Gunpei Yokoi. Thanks to Yokoi, Nintendo had already been making “inventive and strange†toys and arcade amusements; in the late ’70s, videogames were just the next logical step. He rounded up a posse, agreed to babysit a slacker friend of his boss’s family, and built from the ground up Nintendo’s first design studio: R&D#1.
Before long, the kid — an art school graduate named Miyamoto — set the editorial tone of bold colors, bolder concepts, and boldest character design. Then he graduated again to set up his own internal studio, and over the next five years completed and refined the two or three ideas he would ever have as a game designer.