Ben Gilbert: commitment

Transcript context

…Much lower price point. They sell millions of these things in the late 70s and early 80s in Japan, which keeps financing the other R&D team. Also, they haven't forgotten about the arcade side of the business, too. Yamauchi spins up a third R&D team just to focus on making arcade titles, because he also knows that software is going to be really important for this eventual home console. They're basically saying, we want to learn what games are great, and once we have a stable of those great games, then we can unleash them on whatever our next generation console ends up being. But for now, we need to create a bunch of games in the arcades, in cabinets, so we know what the hits are going to be. I will say, to know what the hits are going to be, basically, none of them were at first. I imagine there was a year at Nintendo over in Japan where they're hitting the oh-crap button, where they're like, we may not have any good games to put on this thing. Fortunately, the console wasn't ready yet. There's one more piece of the puzzle, though, and that's that he needs to get a foothold in the American market so that they can get distribution relationships there and actually be able to enter it.…

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