Playing to Wiin: Nintendo and the Video Game Industry's Greatest Comeback
by Daniel Sloan
Wiley, HK$200
To casual observers, Nintendo has long been a juggernaut in the video game industry - its flagship character, Mario the plumber, has been synonymous with video games ever since the revolutionary game Super Mario Bros, and Nintendo's home video game console Wii, with 85 million units sold worldwide, is leading the digital entertainment industry.
But the Japanese video game giant, the undisputed leader in the video game industry during the 80s with its Famicom (Nintendo Entertainment System in North America) gaming hardware, was actually in dire straits for several years, from the late 90s to the mid-2000s after several hardware blunders and increasing competition from Microsoft and Sony pushed it to a distant third in the industry.
At one point, things were so bleak for Nintendo, industry insiders predicted that much like what Sega had done in 2001, the company would withdraw from the hardware market and focus on distributing its games for rival consoles.
But now, Nintendo is back on top, and Daniel Sloan's Playing to Wiin: Nintendo and the Video Game Industry's Greatest Comeback provides an insider's look at the rise, fall, and redemption of Nintendo.
Despite utilising mostly second-hand accounts (Nintendo did not cooperate with the project), Sloan - an experienced American financial journalist based in Japan - paints a vivid tale that includes a detailed origin of the firm, which started as a playing-card company in 1889, and the company politics that involved the family-owned operation.