Acquired / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
56 published records
01 / evaluation
“Now we take it for granted that whenever you play a video game, you're entering some escapist fantasy, but that was a brand new novel idea.”
02 / evaluation
“Specifically, what was really valued in Silicon Valley and Technology Engineering at this time, was the ability to design systems with the highest amount of functionality with the fewest number of chips, because every chip that you put in there, added a whole lot of cost to the bill of materials.”
03 / recommendation
“So much of next episode is going to be about Pokemon, but I used to buy Nintendo Power for the maps of the Pokemon levels, to be able to show you where you need to go walk to unlock something and where different Pokemon are found.”
04 / belief
“I think that net income was probably suppressed and artificially low, perhaps, in part because of all the cash sloshing around that they're using, but also all the international entities.”
05 / belief
“To put a finer point on that, I don't think there's any software involved. I think everything is hard-coded in these chips at this point in time.”
06 / belief
“Of course, at the time, I think a DEC PDP-1 cost over $100,000, which is over a million dollars today.”
07 / belief
“I think PlayStation and Xbox, it's different with the subscription stuff today, but target a seven-game or eight-game attach rate.”
08 / commitment
“I will say, to know what the hits are going to be, basically, none of them were at first.”
09 / belief
“You're right, I think there is some sort of scale economy, some network economy here, but we're both describing the same phenomenon.”
10 / belief
“The only one that immediately comes to mind is I think Apple and iOS, not of revenue but of profits, have something on the order of that global market share of smartphone profits.”
11 / uncertainty
“I don't know if it's actually how it works, but it's effectively a Nintendo signed cryptographic thing.”
12 / uncertainty
“Before we get into the fifth cycle of the Yamauchi family, I don't know if it's a curse or a blessing, probably both.”
13 / uncertainty
“I don't know that that's branding, though. The definition of branding is if you receive two identical objects, and you're willing to pay more money to buy from the firm with branding power.”
14 / belief
“I think we talked about this with Michael, but this is where it comes out in the court case.”
15 / belief
“I think the scale economies when you define it, is that you can make a fixed cost investment that is more valuable to you than it is your competitors because you can spread that cost across more customers that can pay it back in a bigger way.”
16 / belief
“In this era, if I buy my kids a Nintendo system, I can be very sure that there's not going to be excessive blood and guts, there's not going to be sexual content, and there's not going to be profanity. I think that's definitely branding because the Genesis brand is against that.”
17 / evaluation
“The gorilla—this is important—does not want to hurt the girlfriend. He actually likes her quite a bit.”
18 / belief
“Playing cards and card games had originally entered Japan from the West in the 1500s, but then they'd been banned for hundreds of years when Japan's rulers followed a strict isolationist policy and basically kicked all Western influence out of the country. I think I knew this, but I'd forgotten till doing the research.”
19 / belief
“I think that's something they've woken up to with the Switch—again, foreshadowing here—to the extent where the next big console that Nintendo comes out with, is a Switch and is super Switch compatible, then they actually start entering the scale economies game, where they can make the biggest, best piece of hardware if they can get more people paying a subscription.”
20 / uncertainty
“The legend goes that as they're debating this, the landlord of their warehouse in Tukwila, either shows up or sends a letter. It's unclear.”
21 / belief
“My God, I think Nintendo might have every single one of these powers of looking at this.”
22 / belief
“LPs, I would say maybe a week after this episode comes out, keep an eye out for an email pulling you.”
23 / belief
“I think so, too. We talked about 1983 being a really crazy year for gaming. There was a company started in 1983 that was supposed to be a gaming company, that became very large, that was not a gaming company.”
24 / uncertainty
“I don't know 100% for sure, but I think Arakawa was like, yo, the reason I don't want to launch now is now is not the time to launch this in America, I can see what's going to happen here, so maybe it wouldn't have.”
25 / uncertainty
“Totally. It just literally never pays back when you're thinking about, I don't know if it was nickels or quarters, but whatever you're putting in the arcade machines.”
26 / belief
“Exactly. This is I think the first store within a store in America, literally. They come in, they set up the Nintendo displays, and they do everything.”
27 / belief
“Absolutely. I think there's plenty of counter positioning all throughout Nintendo history.”
28 / belief
“I think for those of you who know your Nintendo history, David just said, and this is how God is discovered.”
29 / belief
“I don't think I realized how big the arcade market got before there were even video game consoles in the home.”
30 / belief
“I think Nintendo is such a perfect case study of this dichotomy and they're both so true.”
31 / observation
“The way to address a thousand consumers is to make a machine and let them flock to the bar to drop quarters in.”
32 / belief
“Strict censorship, all of this stuff that we think of Nintendo today. They've been in the toy business for decades at this point.”
33 / belief
“I think you're right. I can't think of a counterexample off the top of my head or where a counterexample would even exist.”
34 / belief
“I think bear and bull is stupid since we know the history from 1990–2023, so let's actually grade.”
35 / belief
“There's a one frame thing that happens. I think that you can still see this in the early Duck Hunt games.”
36 / belief
“I think Howard Lincoln was the personal lawyer first of the two guys who ran the import distribution business.”
37 / belief
“The other one that's close, but I think is more around 85%-90% is US-based search engine usage.”
38 / evaluation
“Now you actually have a reason to be in stores. Now that you're in stores, it doesn't matter how you got there.”
39 / belief
“I think you're onto something that these are linked because it's all about the hardware R&D cycle, because you have to invest an enormous fixed cost of both money for everybody now, but at first, for Nintendo's time, in developing a superior hardware platform.”
40 / observation
“The only way they could get the price down far enough to hit the price point they wanted to retail was to place a three million unit order upfront, which was crazy at the time.”
41 / belief
“I think that's why it's hard to be an investor and specifically hard to be a public company investor.”
42 / belief
“Again, the iPhone parallel here, Steve Jobs always said this is five years ahead of the competition. I think that ended up being, round it maybe a year or two, but basically right.”
43 / belief
“I think there's this really weird dynamic with Nintendo, which is why I'm so happy we're doing this episode, that it's just overlooked and underappreciated as a business story, partially for the reasons you're saying.”
44 / belief
“I think she was either the wife or girlfriend of one of the guys working at the company at Nintendo of America at the time.”
45 / belief
“Arcade games back then in the 50s and 60s were not what we think of arcade games today.”
46 / commitment
“The Legend of Zelda, which actually was the launch game for the Famicom Disk System in Japan, which we won't get into here.”
47 / preference
“You have to build for Nintendo because there's more money there, because it's amortized across so many different users of the platform that it's just always worth it.”
48 / evaluation
“The third thing that they build into the Nintendo of America licensing program, your games that you publish on the NES have to be exclusive to the NES for at least two years, which doesn't matter right now because there's no viable competition, but will become very important very soon.”
49 / evaluation
“I think with Super Mario 3, the NES is old in the tooth, the Genesis is out at this point, and the graphics aren't industry-leading like they used to be.”
50 / evaluation
“The thing that we realized and Ben and I were texting about this as we were doing the research, all these books either focus on the Nintendo Japan story or the Nintendo America story, or the video games in America story or the video games in Japan story, and they keep them separate.”
51 / evaluation
“What the team that Miyamoto is leading is saying, we are on a quest to be inspired, find fun, and then we will build exactly the right window dressing around that fun, that real kernel, that core mechanic that we love, and no more.”
52 / prediction
“I think we have a part two in the works because the story of Nintendo after 1990 is a completely different company and a completely different set of analyses to do so.”
53 / evaluation
“We got to go to the West Coast of America because the fatal mistake that we made with Radar Scope is we placed this huge order with a four-month lag time.”
54 / evaluation
“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.”
55 / prediction
“The quality of the product, the quality of the games, if we make and make available exclusively the very best games out there on our platform, we will win.”
56 / recommendation
“I used to buy Nintendo Power for the maps of the Pokemon levels, to be able to show you where you need to go walk to unlock something and where different Pokemon are found.”