Precisely as this issue lands on your browser or e-book reader, “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” is hitting theaters and receiving (at the time of this article) a rather tepid reception from audiences and critics. A feature film inspired by one of the most popular game franchises of all time, itself the brainchild of a company that loves secrecy, rarely revealing anything about itself, with a zeal that would make Apple jealous. The second of this month’s Library entries hits with particularly good timing.
Keza MacDonald, the author of “Super Nintendo: The Game-Changing Company That Unlocked the Power of Play” (2026), is no stranger to video games; quite the opposite, as she is probably one of the most knowledgeable experts in the field. A passionate gamer since childhood, she is now the video games editor at The Guardian, reviewing releases from all editors and covering major gaming events all over the world.
Such credentials must have obviously played in her favor the day she went knocking on Nintendo’s doors with the subversive idea of writing this book. According to her, the management opened up archives and provided material in such a way that surprised even the author.
The final result is a delightful book, filled with anecdotes about the story of the company, from the late nineteenth century until today, and the various transformations it endured through the ages. (Spoiler alert: no, they did not make video games at the beginning.)
And the focus of her narrative is, unsurprisingly, games. Each chapter is named after a famous Nintendo title, but she uses them as a basis for the “behind the scenes” story: the developers, the marketing strategies, and finally, the management choices that shaped each of those works.
On September 8th, 1993, Nathan Myhrvold of Microsoft shared a memo with his colleagues titled “Road Kill on the Information Highway”. This document contains rather prescient claims:
As the information highway and the growth in computing price/performance progress, new narrative and entertainment formats will develop. Computer games will increase in production values until you won’t be able to tell the difference between the game and a movie - they will be equally realistic.
I am pretty sure that the gamers of 2026 among you are nodding frantically. But wait, there is more: Myhrvold somehow also foresaw those “Pokémon GO” players risking their lives to chase beloved characters in the most bizarre locations a decade ago:
High bandwidth communications over the highway will enable multiple people to come together and share the same experience - real or simulated.
Nintendo has had an oversized impact on the game industry, and it is the only big company that has survived in the market from the early 1980s to today (Sega, at a time one of Nintendo’s biggest competitors, partially gave up at the end of the 1990s). Their hardware is regularly derided as less powerful options than that of their competitors, yet they achieve uncanny experiences around them, universally praised as the pinnacle of gaming, decade after decade.
We briefly mentioned Apple in the first paragraph of this article; the comparison is not anodyne, as one of the deciding success factors of Nintendo is the joint design of both hardware and software in a simultaneous dance. One of the most successful examples of this approach is “Wii Sports”, one of the best-selling games of all time, released together with their groundbreaking Wii console.
Let us push the analogy with Apple a bit further. Shall we compare Satoru Iwata, Nintendo’s CEO from 2002 to 2015, with Steve Jobs? There are a few parallels running between them, indeed, the most tragic of which being their premature deaths at almost the same age and for similar reasons. They both excelled at introducing products at legendary events and had an uncanny eye to understand market dynamics. They both understood that weird, unfathomable connection between arts and technology, and both knew how to make an insanely large monetary profit out of it. But only one of them got a biography authored by Walter Isaacson, at least at the time of this publication.
There is a deeper and more interesting theme spread through the pages of Keza MacDonald’s book. In an industry that prides itself on burning developers out to churn multi-billion-dollar franchises, Nintendo has an unprecedentedly low level of employee turnover. It is not unheard of for programmers and designers to stay literal decades at their jobs; would not that be a healthy goal for any of us? What kind of Peopleware-worthy management ideas would we need to apply to reach those levels? I doubt that many of my readers work in the human resources department, but still, I hope some of us programmers can point them to revolutionary ideas such as not having to burn out. I know, crazy, right?
Through this people-centric culture, Nintendo has become a weird kind of generational business in which the software developers of today creating the games of tomorrow are effectively the same kids who were playing the Nintendo games of yesteryear. This phenomenon is a core feature of how the company works: Keza MacDonald reports on transgenerational teams, consisting of veterans and younger team members, all working together to craft new experiences.
Keza MacDonald also highlights the remarkable work done by Nintendo to foster the presence of women, and rightfully so; not only through immensely popular female characters in their games, but also by literally having all-women teams in their engineering and design departments, building the next blockbuster hand in hand with their male counterparts. In an exhaustingly male-dominated industry, such commitment deserves praise and imitation.
Quoted by Keza MacDonald, and quite honestly summarizing the legacy of Nintendo in our world (beyond the astronomic numbers of game sales and other numerical paraphernalia), French writer Roger Caillois explored and expanded Johan Huizinga’s ideas of “Homo Ludens” in a 1961 essay called “Man, Play and Games”.
In it, Caillois established games as a human activity happening on a spectrum between spontaneous whim (known as “Paidia”) and disciplined calculation (referred to as “Ludus”): the former representing the primitive joy of movement, improvisation, and joy, while the latter represents the desire to triumph over difficulty with effort, patience, skill, or ingenuity. Both Paidia and Ludus are the psychological fuel that drives the countless nights we spend in front of our game consoles, very often bearing the Nintendo moniker on them.
Cover photo by the author.