About book Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America (2011)
I had high hopes for this book, but I found too many glaring errors and misinformation that I simply could not overlook.The author claims to be a lifelong gamer, but sadly he can't get basic release dates and basic facts straight. He consistently mixes up console names when referencing Japanese and US systems (ie: The JPN Super Famicom is sometimes referred to as the American Super Nintendo). Mario's well known enemies, the mushroom-like Goombas are referred to as 'Goombahs' on 2 occasions. And many of the basic facts and claims are flat out wrong.This is my biggest gripe with these bloggers-turned authors. They simply don't have a good working knowledge of the material that they claim to be the authorities on. That said, beyond the glaring errors and suspect writing style, I did enjoy reading about the early days of Nintendo and the management team that risked it all to make headways into the US market. OK. So most of you will probably want to know what I was expecting. This is, after all, a book that starts with the development of "Donkey Kong" and ends with the Wii. And no, I wasn't expecting a lot. But this book still managed to disappoint me.There were some interesting parts -- the original launch of "Donkey Kong" as a retrofit to a game that failed, the sheer chutzpah of the Universal Studios lawsuit, and the utter disaster that was the Super Mario Bros. live-action film (which, apparently, almost starred Tom Hanks). And there are some insights to be gleaned throughout as to why Nintendo was so successful in the 80s and early 90s, how it lost ground to the PlayStation and Xbox, and how it came back with the Wii. But overall, this book is little more than a series of video game reviews (there's at least one in every chapter) strung together, with an occasional discussion of business strategy, innovation management practices, and the like. The effect is similar to reading a stack of _Nintendo Power_ magazines from the last 20 years, with the occasional clipping from _Business Week_ thrown in.The author is a former video game reviewer for the sorts of websites that publish video game reviews, and he's obviously much more comfortable writing that sort of thing than tackling the sort of hard journalism required to get at the whys and wherefores of a business's successes and failures. He claims, in his acknowledgements section, that he had interviews lined up with Nintendo employees (including their master game designer, Shigeru Miyamoto) at the beginning of his project, but access dried up once it became apparent to Nintendo that he was writing a book, and not just a magazine article. I don't think there are any direct quotes from any of the players throughout the book. We're told at various points that Nintendo was doing well, or not doing well, or doing well but not as well as Sony, etc., but there aren't any numbers or charts from financial statements and the like included.On almost every page, the author "peps up" the story by using silly puns or outrageous similes. This is bad enough. But worse, many times this sarcastic tone is applied to the motivations or inner thought processes of the people in the story. It's hard to tell what's really a fact (e.g. Shigeru had attitude X about Y in year Z) and what's merely the author attempting to "liven up" an otherwise dull account. Similar flippant remarks about the technical specs of various products (particularly the discussion of the GameCube's use of a 32-bit RISC architecture) made this reader question the author's understanding of hardware.
Do You like book Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America (2011)?
This was a fun listen and a good history of Nintendo and insight into their approach.
—tauniann
My6 years old found it very intertaining but, struggled on some few trickery words
—Nabilla
Very interesting, but maybe a little too long.
—rena
