Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America [Hardcover]

The best part of this book, by far, is the cover. It's an arresting piece of artwork for anyone who grew up with a Nintendo: Mario paused in mid-jump, a perfectly Nintendo shade of blue wallpapered behind him. It's an image that promises more than the book offers.

The writing is clean and straightforward but far too often Ryan resorts to pop culture jokes (the intro to Sonic the Hedgehog is particularly brutal) or cultural stereotypes (in the section detailing with the creation of the first Mario arcade game are the inevitable references to yin and yang and Japanese Zen). It's a style that should be familiar to anyone who's read Wired magazine. There are also a few spelling errors sprinkled throughout the book, nothing terrible, although Konami is referred to as Komani.

As a history of Nintendo it's a worthy primer but don't expect anything as in-depth or meticulously researched as David Sheff's "Game Over: How Nintendo Conquered the World," from which "Super Mario" paraphrased a cover image and a subtitle. "Game Over" was a video game book but also a business book. At nearly 500 pages it offered a level of detail and character necessary to understand the under-scrutinized subject. Ryan too often focuses on the trivial and skates by the interesting; multiple page bios on historical footnotes like Captain Lou Albano and Billy Mitchell yet a single paragraph of background on Shigeru Miyamoto. For a more compelling look at the history of Nintendo and Miyamato, I'd first refer one to "Game Over" and "Master of Play" by Nick Paumgarten from the New Yorker.

Ryan's greatest mistake is in his disregard for any description of the actual act of playing video games. There's never any sense of what it's like to hold a controller in one's hands and play a game. Although it's safe to assume that most everyone who reads this book will have played most of the games described within, there is something missing to a book that covers such an intensely interactive activity without any mention of what it's like to participate. It's like writing a book about football and never describing what happens on the field. The other recent mainstream book about video games, last year's "Extra Lives" by Tom Bissell, details the peculiar mix of immersion and passivity that goes into playing video games as does Nicholson Baker's "Painkiller Deathstreak" from the New Yorker magazine.

It's been nearly twenty years since Sheff's book and since then there's been an explosion of innovation and expansion in the video game industry, largely undocumented by anyone other than industry trade magazines and online publications. Ryan's book is good video game journalism, but it needs to be better than that. It needs to be good journalism.

I am rarely moved to share my opinions on things, but there's a lot about this book that I can't keep quiet about.
As far as the content of the book, I agree with what other reviewers have said in that the author's telling of Nintendo's history up until about the SNES, at most N64 era, is the book's strongest. For Nintendo's history after that, you're not much better off than asking a Gamestop employee for it. As for this writing style, I also felt he was trying too hard to be hip and witty and detracted from the book. To call a past Japanese NOA president "Grandpa Ojisan" (Grandpa grandpa?) and then Reggie Fils-Aime "Will Smith" was about as funny as a Hiroshima joke. But that's his writing style and I've already bought the book, and that's not what really bothered me.
What really irked me with this book is the misinformation. This book seems more like a 200 page wikipedia entry than a published work. A few mistakes is forgivable but the amount this book has makes me wonder who proof-read it. For being written by a 'life-long gamer' and focusing on Nintendo, it's amazing how he can misspell the system that was the catalyst for video games throughout the whole book - the Famicom (FAMily COMputer) not Famicon. Also, it's the DSLL (or DSXL), not DSX (it's still on store shelves for crying out loud). There's also a lot of other wrong info and misspellings, but a few standouts were claiming the original PSP had 16gb of memory built in, that the Xbox 360 and PS3 both required $100 of extra charges to play online at launch, that the original Pokemon's types were fire, water and ice (assuming he was referring to Charmander, Squirtle and Bulbasaur) or claiming that both Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest were made by Square during the N64 era.
All in all, it seems the only explanation would be that the author did much of his research with current facts, that the author wrote a history book without actually knowing too much of video game history.
This book might be ok for readers not so in-the-know about video games, but if you want more solid facts I would highly suggest reading David Scheff's "Game Over" (I believe he has an updated edition, but the original goes up to about 1993) and the recently published Nintendo Magic by Osamu Inoue. Although those two books will be at least double, maybe triple the current $16 buy-in on this book, at least you'll have real information.

Picked up this book at my local library in the business section, hey I grew up on Nintendo, so I'll give it a shot. Thought it would be more of a business book, delving into behind-the-scenes strategy sessions, tough choices, key marketing tactics, etc. What I got instead was a shallow history of Nintendo that comes off as sponsored by Nintendo because there are very few negative things written about the company in this book.

This book goes just a little deeper than Nintendo's Wikipedia entry, but not by much. A good history on how Nintendo started, how they got into the video game industry, how they were making arcade cabinets, and how that turned into the Nintendo we know today. But where Nintendo's dominance really began, when the NES/Famicom took off, is where the book starts to get shallow and gives no real insight.

This book is very pro-Nintendo. No mention of Nintendo's illegal practices to stifle the competition, like how Nintendo wouldn't let stores sell Nintendo products if they carried a competitor's product. There are a few brief mentions of how Nintendo tried to keep Blockbuster from renting its games, but this info is relegated to a few brief blurbs, with no detail, insight, or story. The author is quick to bash Sega's many add-ons (like the Sega CD, 32x, etc.), but doesn't talk about how Nintendo did the same thing earlier (Power Pad, Power Glove, R.O.B., U-Force, and dozens of others pointless peripherals). Failures like the Virtual Boy were glazed over. Despite being pro-Nintendo throughout, the closing chapter strangely starts off talking about how Nintendo makes little effort to recycle and uses sweatshop labor, which was odd since this part didn't flow well with the rest of the story at all.

I would rate it 3 stars. Overall it's a pretty easy read and well written, with maybe a few too many obscure cultural references that may go over some readers' heads. For a book essentially on electronics, it gives just enough hardware specs to get its point across without boring the casual reader with technical jargon. Essentially it's a Nintendo propaganda piece, but still offers a good story and a good summary of the history of Nintendo, written in a manner that flows well and keeps you turning the pages. Just don't expect any real depth or insight.

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