Posting this story on the 85th anniversary of Black Tuesday, when the New York Stock Exchange plummeted 30 points and heralded the start of the Great Depression, is rather apropos. For at the dawn of the 80’s, Nintendo’s fledgling American subsidiary was in its own tailspin, and its fate would hang on the licensing of a depression-era cartoon icon for a hit video game.
Formed in 1980 in order to distribute Nintendo arcade games in the U.S., sales of derivative product such as HeliFire and Space Firebird for Nintendo of America had flatlined. NOA boss Minoru Arakawa put all of his eggs in one basket with Radarscope, a Galaxian clone that did little to distinguish itself from the other similar shoot-em-ups that littered American arcades. Only able to sell half of the cabinets he had ordered, Arakawa contacted his father-in-law in Japan, Nintendo, Ltd. boss Hiroshi Yamauchi, with a desperate plea: send him a hit game, or give up your dream of conquering the U.S. video game market. To produce such a game, Yamauchi paired a junior employee unversed in game design, named Shigeru Miyamoto, with his most seasoned hardware engineer, Gunpei Yokoi. The pair’s original intent was to quickly adapt a 42-year-old iconic cartoon character to a video game.
The story continues in the TDE Bitstory archive, after the jump: