David Rosenthal: commitment

Transcript context

…I love it. I had no idea. It's so freaking awesome. It obviously becomes a huge success. The first Japanese production run of the Gameboy sells 300,000 units almost immediately. The first US shipment of 1.1 million units also sells out immediately. The killer app, especially in the US driving sales, is not a kid's game, but Tetris. We won't tell the whole story. It's pretty amazing of how Tetris, the game, comes out of the communist Soviet Union, makes it onto the Gameboy in the US, and becomes the most popular game of all time. Go watch the movie. I've heard that it's great. It is. Yeah, I watched it this week. It's obviously a little over dramatized. It is pretty crazy that the talk about the name of the game is the game. A Soviet programmer invented this game that was then so obvious to everybody who looked at it that this thing was the perfect game, that there was this massive geopolitical mini war over who could get the rights to this thing and all these different countries on all these different consoles. Nintendo, we think of them as this very nice and shiny company making stuff for kids, but executing the steps they needed to take to obtain the license for Tetris is a wild story. The movie is awesome. The important thing that the movie does a good job of underscoring is Minoru Arakawa deeply understood once he saw a demo of Tetris for Gameboy that this could expand the market beyond just games for little boys and teenage boys.…

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