Author: Osamu Inoue
Publisher: Vertical Inc
ISBN: 1647291453
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
Back in the 80s, Nintendo ruled the home-entertainment market with the NES (Nintendo Entertainment System). But then rival Sony introduced PlayStation, which featured advancements and cutting-edge technology that put Nintendo's Super-NES to shame. Nintendo quickly lost its dominant market share to Sony and found itself floundering. In 2006, Nintendo released Wii at the same time Sony introduced its highly-anticipated and much-vaunted PlayStation III and Microsoft's XBox 360. Wii's David defeated PlayStation's Goliath, inversely echoing the SNES/PlayStation outcome of a decade previous. Nintendo Magic: Winning the Videogame Wars is the story of what went right, discussing the business strategies and marketing savvy that took on the mighty Sony and won. Topics include: How where you put your company is just as important as how you run it: being in Kyoto From work force to policies, why Nintendo's "just enough" attitude succeeds Why the ability to read a balance sheet is overrated Respect seniority but approve huge R&D budgets for talented junior employees Allowing maximum communication between disparate divisions (hardware and software) Enlarging the pie: going after casual gamers (The art of mainstreaming) How the Wii will be the next major household appliance and the DSi will be the cell phone of the future. Nintendo Magic: Winning the Videogame Wars should serve as a warning to similar powerhouse industries never to understimate the modest competitor. It should occupy the bookshelf of any business person smart enough to know they don't need to be a giant to win.

Author: Steven E. Jones
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262300532
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
Nintendo’s hugely popular and influential video game console system considered as technological device and social phenomenon. The Nintendo Wii, introduced in 2006, helped usher in a moment of retro-reinvention in video game play. This hugely popular console system, codenamed Revolution during development, signaled a turn away from fully immersive, time-consuming MMORPGs or forty-hour FPS games and back toward family fun in the living room. Players using the wireless motion-sensitive controller (the Wii Remote, or “Wiimote”) play with their whole bodies, waving, swinging, swaying. The mimetic interface shifts attention from what's on the screen to what's happening in physical space. This book describes the Wii’s impact in technological, social, and cultural terms, examining the Wii as a system of interrelated hardware and software that was consciously designed to promote social play in physical space. Each chapter of Codename Revolution focuses on a major component of the Wii as a platform: the console itself, designed to be low-powered and nimble; the iconic Wii Remote; Wii Fit Plus, and its controller, the Wii Balance Board; the Wii Channels interface and Nintendo’s distribution system; and the Wii as a social platform that not only affords multiplayer options but also encourages social interaction in shared physical space. Finally, the authors connect the Wii’s revolution in mimetic interface gaming—which eventually led to the release of Sony’s Move and Microsoft’s Kinect—to some of the economic and technological conditions that influence the possibility of making something new in this arena of computing and culture.

Author: Mary Firestone
Publisher: ABDO Publishing Company
ISBN: 1617840955
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 114

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Book Description
This title examines the remarkable lives of Fusajiro Yamauchi and his grandson Hiroshi Yamauchi and their work building the groundbreaking company Nintendo. Readers will learn about the Yamauchis’ backgrounds and education, as well as their early careers. Also covered is a look at how Nintendo operates, other key employees, and issues the company faces, such as developing new gaming software, facing competition, and expanding into global markets. Color photos, detailed maps, and informative sidebars accompany easy-to-read, compelling text. Features include a timeline, facts, additional resources, web sites, a glossary, a bibliography, and an index. Technology Pioneers is a series in Essential Library, an imprint of ABDO Publishing Company.

Author: Ken Horowitz
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476641765
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Before the enormously successful NES console changed the video game landscape in the 1980s, Nintendo became famous for producing legendary arcade machines like Donkey Kong and Mario Bros. Drawing on original interviews, news reports and other documents, this book traces Nintendo's rise from a small business that made playing cards to the top name in the arcade industry. Twenty-eight game titles are examined in-depth, along with the people and events that defined the company for more than four decades.

Author: Alex Custodio
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262360462
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
The Game Boy Advance platform as computational system and cultural artifact, from its 2001 release through hacks, mods, emulations, homebrew afterlives. In 2002, Nintendo of America launched an international marketing campaign for the Game Boy Advance that revolved around the slogan "Who Are You?"--asking potential buyers which Nintendo character, game, or even device they identified with and attempting to sell a new product by exploiting players' nostalgic connections to earlier ones. Today, nearly two decades after its release, and despite the development of newer and more powerful systems, Nintendo's Game Boy Advance lives on, through a community that continues to hack, modify, emulate, make, break, remake, redesign, trade, use, love, and play with the platform. In this book Alex Custodio traces the network of hardware and software afterlives of the Game Boy Advance platform.

Author: Adam Sutherland
Publisher: The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc
ISBN: 1448871239
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 50

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Book Description
This insightful book reveals how Nintendo came into being, the entrepreneurs behind the success of the brand, the key facts about the video game industry, and Nintendo's impact in the global market. Nintendo's dazzling transformation from a card-based game company to the world's leading producer of digital entertainment is explored, and all of the company's seminal triumphs are examined—from the handheld Game Boy to the global breakout sensation Wii. Nintendo pioneered the home video game industry and continues to define its cutting edge.

Author: Nathan Altice
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262534541
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 439

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Book Description
The complex material histories of the Nintendo Entertainment System platform, from code to silicon, focusing on its technical constraints and its expressive affordances. In the 1987 Nintendo Entertainment System videogame Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, a character famously declared: I AM ERROR. Puzzled players assumed that this cryptic mesage was a programming flaw, but it was actually a clumsy Japanese-English translation of “My Name is Error,” a benign programmer's joke. In I AM ERROR Nathan Altice explores the complex material histories of the Nintendo Entertainment System (and its Japanese predecessor, the Family Computer), offering a detailed analysis of its programming and engineering, its expressive affordances, and its cultural significance. Nintendo games were rife with mistranslated texts, but, as Altice explains, Nintendo's translation challenges were not just linguistic but also material, with consequences beyond simple misinterpretation. Emphasizing the technical and material evolution of Nintendo's first cartridge-based platform, Altice describes the development of the Family Computer (or Famicom) and its computational architecture; the “translation” problems faced while adapting the Famicom for the U.S. videogame market as the redesigned Entertainment System; Nintendo's breakthrough console title Super Mario Bros. and its remarkable software innovations; the introduction of Nintendo's short-lived proprietary disk format and the design repercussions on The Legend of Zelda; Nintendo's efforts to extend their console's lifespan through cartridge augmentations; the Famicom's Audio Processing Unit (APU) and its importance for the chiptunes genre; and the emergence of software emulators and the new kinds of play they enabled.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Computer games
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description

Author: Mark J. P. Wolf
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313379378
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 788

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Book Description
This encyclopedia collects and organizes theoretical and historical content on the topic of video games, covering the people, systems, technologies, and theoretical concepts as well as the games themselves. This two-volume encyclopedia addresses the key people, companies, regions, games, systems, institutions, technologies, and theoretical concepts in the world of video games, serving as a unique resource for students. The work comprises over 300 entries from 97 contributors, including Ralph Baer and Nolan Bushnell, founders of the video game industry and some of its earliest games and systems. Contributing authors also include founders of institutions, academics with doctoral degrees in relevant fields, and experts in the field of video games. Organized alphabetically by topic and cross-referenced across subject areas, Encyclopedia of Video Games: The Culture, Technology, and Art of Gaming will serve the needs of students and other researchers as well as provide fascinating information for game enthusiasts and general readers.

Author: Dominic Arsenault
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262341506
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
How the Super Nintendo Entertainment System embodied Nintendo’s s resistance to innovation and took the company from industry leadership to the margins of videogaming. This is a book about the Super Nintendo Entertainment System that is not celebratory or self-congratulatory. Most other accounts declare the Super NES the undisputed victor of the “16-bit console wars” of 1989–1995. In this book, Dominic Arsenault reminds us that although the SNES was a strong platform filled with high-quality games, it was also the product of a short-sighted corporate vision focused on maintaining Nintendo’s market share and business model. This led the firm to fall from a dominant position during its golden age (dubbed by Arsenault the “ReNESsance”) with the NES to the margins of the industry with the Nintendo 64 and GameCube consoles. Arsenault argues that Nintendo’s conservative business strategies and resistance to innovation during the SNES years explain its market defeat by Sony’s PlayStation. Extending the notion of “platform” to include the marketing forces that shape and constrain creative work, Arsenault draws not only on game studies and histories but on game magazines, boxes, manuals, and advertisements to identify the technological discourses and business models that formed Nintendo’s Super Power. He also describes the cultural changes in video games during the 1990s that slowly eroded the love of gamer enthusiasts for the SNES as the Nintendo generation matured. Finally, he chronicles the many technological changes that occurred through the SNES's lifetime, including full-motion video, CD-ROM storage, and the shift to 3D graphics. Because of the SNES platform’s architecture, Arsenault explains, Nintendo resisted these changes and continued to focus on traditional gameplay genres.