The Toys That Built America

In the rural Japanese village of Sonobe,

a boy growing up without a TV

looks for other ways to have fun.

Shigeru Miyamoto spent a lot of his childhood

exploring the woods around his home.

And one of the places that was impactful for him,

was this cave nearby his house.

The cave became this mysterious place.

It scared him.

He eventually manages to find the courage, somehow,

to take that step into the cave.

Young Miyamoto's adventures in this cave

will go on to inspire some of

the most iconic video games of all time.

What if we could make him jump?

He literally invented the title of Game Designer.

It did not exist before Shigeru Miyamoto.

And outside the box visionary-

Very good.

He'll help grow Nintendo

from a struggling playing card company,

to a multi-billion dollar video game juggernaut.

The combination of Nintendo's ambition

and Miyamoto's creativity,

it's lightning in a bottle.

Alongside engineering wiz Gunpei Yokoi,

they'll put their games in the hands of

nearly a billion people around the world.

I had a Game Boy as a kid.

My mother was really, really into the Game Boy.

Everybody had one.

And inspire a new generation of visionaries.

Satoshi Tajiri wants to share

this childlike wonder that he felt collecting bugs.

That nets Nintendo

one of the biggest global brands of all time.

With every single innovation they make,

they put the whole industry on notice.

And that has never been done before.

But back in the early '60s,

Miyamoto is just a boy with a wild imagination.

I'll save you, princess!

Today, Nintendo is known for video games,

but when it was founded in 1889,

they sold a different kind of game.

Nintendo starts out

in basically a pleasure district in Kyoto.

They make cards.

Specifically, Hanafuda decks were their specialty.

Kind of the equivalent of what

a Western playing card deck would be.

And for the first half, maybe, of Nintendo's history,

that was their focus.

Until 1949,

when Hiroshi Yamauchi takes over his family's failing business.

When Yamauchi becomes the president of Nintendo,

he purges Nintendo of all other family members.

Soon after,

he looks for new opportunities to make money.

In the mid-century, like '50s and '60s,

they're kind of trying to figure out what to do,

and so they start doing all kinds of other things.

They have taxis.

It's been a rice company.

Ramen noodles.

They used to have a by-the-hour chain of hotels,

called "Love Hotels,"

so yeah, they did a lot of different things.

But it's an unlikely product

from an unexpected employee

that forever changes Nintendo's focus.

So Gunpei Yokoi was an engineer.

He was hired, essentially,

to maintain the factory equipment.

He was just kind of bored in the office

and tinkering with all the parts that were around,

and he built a prototype of what became the "Ultra Hand."

And the "Ultra Hand" is like

an extendable claw, we still see them today.

1966, it premiered and it sold 1.2 million units.

It was a phenomenal hit.

It saved Nintendo from from bankruptcy.

By 1977,

Nintendo has a strong foothold in the toy industry

and 24 year old Shigeru Miyamoto wants in.

Miyamoto was a big fan of cartoons and comic books.

Yes, I do. I do.

His father does not want

him to become a comic book artist,

so Miyamoto goes to college

to become an industrial designer.

Miyamoto is fresh out of school,

has zero experience,

and he meets an incredibly stern businessman in Yamauchi;

a man who is so cutthroat, he's fired his own family.

Miyamoto shows him these coat hangers that he's made

that are in the shape of animals, for children.

And I am sure he was scared out of his pants.

And Yamauchi not only finds the hangers

incredibly delightful and sweet and whimsical,

he realizes this young man has the ability

to make things that have market appeal.

So Yamauchi hires him, this kid,

basically in a junior role

in their product development department.

Yamauchi knows Nintendo will need

Miyamoto's fresh thinking,

as a new craze takes over the world.

In April of 1978, Taito releases "Space Invaders,"

marking the beginning of

the first golden age of arcade games.

"Space Invaders" changed everything in Japan.

It's so ridiculously successful

that it causes a 100 yen shortage

and they have to start suddenly printing

more money in response to it.

In the early days of Nintendo, in the arcade era,

Nintendo is making knockoff games.

Trouble, trouble, all fighters line up.

Nintendo's "Radar Scope"

hits arcades in October of 1980.

It's not exactly "Space invaders,"

but it is "Space Invaders."

It had moderate success in Japan,

enough so that they decide to port it to the US.

Yamauchi ships

3,000 "Radar Scope" arcade cabinets

to the newly established Nintendo of America.

But it takes, like, four months

to come from Japan to the United States.

And by that time, the world has moved on.

At this time in 1980,

the video game landscape is dominated

by a little, hungry, yellow creature known as "Pac-Man."

Space-based shooters, out, "Pac-Man Fever," very much in.

"Radar Scope" fails spectacularly in the US.

And so all of a sudden, they have

over 2,000 unsold cabinets sitting in a warehouse.

This is the death knell to Nintendo of America,

if they can't figure out how to move these cabinets.

There's nothing wrong with it, but they can't sell it.

But can they think about a new way to use it?

Yamauchi comes up with the idea

of essentially creating a new game out of it.

Moshi moshi?

And so what they do, is they open it up

to an internal idea competition

and Shigero Miyamoto steps forward

with the beginning of an idea.

Miyamoto is a big fan of "Popeye;"

Popeye the Sailor.

So at this point, "Popeye" is hugely popular

the world over, especially in Japan.

Years earlier, Nintendo had licensed "Popeye"

in order to make Hanafuda cards.

They already have rights to the "Popeye" image,

so why not use it for the video game?

Miyamoto's reassigned to now take the lead

on this design project.

He tells Miyamoto,

you have to build something that works within what we have.

He has no idea what he's doing.

He has never designed a video game before.

His job at Nintendo was essentially

to make artwork decals

for the outside of the coin op cabinets.

To help Miyamoto,

Yamauchi appoints his star engineer, Gunpei Yokoi;

the man behind Nintendo's first handheld:

the "Game & Watch."

The Game & Watch is about the size of a human hand.

It's this little digital screen and it plays one game.

And the reason why the Game & Watch is so brilliant,

is it has provided the foundation

of every piece of Nintendo hardware,

all the way up to the Wii-U.

Yokoi is able to explain to Miyamoto

exactly what hardware specifications are

and how they need to be informing his design choices.

Now, Yokoi and Miyamoto

need to align on a concept.

Miyamoto was really interested

in the kind of narrative potential of games,

which is like a little wild at that point, actually.

In the early '80s,

video games were made by programmers.

And really, it kind of showed

on some of those early games.

Early on, a lot of them,

the story is that you shoot something.

That is the story.

And Miyamoto wants to change that.

So Miyamoto starts looking at this cabinet of failures

and thinks, okay, I'm gonna tell a story using "Popeye."

So there's a Popeye cartoon called, "A Dream, Walking"

and if you watch it,

Olive Oyl is sleepwalking

and she's walking up girders in a construction site.

So they make the goal of this game climbing a skyscraper.

But the game cabinet's technology is limited.