David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…That's the crazy thing. This is the thing that I think I couldn't tell between reading stories from the US perspective stories, from the Japanese perspective. Do you have a sense of how that dynamic went? I read so many versions of this, so a lot of this is my speculation. I can't 100% say for sure that this is exactly what happened, but this is how I imagined based on everything I read. I think Yamauchi wanted to do it, I think Arakawa did not. I think Yamauchi overruled Arakawa and said, fine. If you're not going to do it, we're going to partner with somebody who will. Even though you set up everything to be in-house with Nintendo, set up this whole Nintendo of America, the distribution arm, we went through all this, you proved yourself with Donkey Kong, even though I saved you, but I wanted to sell to Taito and you said that was wrong, I want to get this in the US so badly, I'm going to go around you. Nintendo goes to Atari. Remember this? We talked about this with Nolan Bushnell and he was like, yeah, I wasn't involved, I was really dumb. He had already left Atari at this point and it was owned by Warner. Yamauchi goes to Atari and says, Nintendo of America is not going to launch the Famicom, I want you to launch the Famicom now in the US. They basically have a deal done. They negotiate it. This is going to be Atari, under Warner’s nose, that their hardware, the 2600 at this point, is dead. It can't compete with the NES. They also know the market is totally gone sideways. They're like, sure, worst case scenario, we can just sit on a competitor, tie up Nintendo, and not launch this. Best case scenario, this is the Atari and Nintendo Entertainment System. Wow. What happened?…

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