Crystal Palace Park, in south London, is home to a number of monsters. Most famous are the concrete dinosaurs, based on the best guesses of Victorian paleontologists, that were placed there when the palace was moved from Hyde Park in the mid-19th century. But it’s also common to see groups of people roaming the park, holding smartphones, exclaiming occasionally about mythical beasts only they can see. They are playing Pokémon Go, an online game that was released in 2016 and still has around 85 million players. Many of these people are, in the nicest possible way, nerds who are probably not naturally disposed to meeting groups of people or going on walks, but the opportunity to capture a Garados or train their Jigglypuff has persuaded them to do so. Only a game like Pokémon could have this effect; if these people were playing Call of Duty, they would be doing so sitting down, at home, networked but physically alone. Their regular presence in the park is testament to the charm and social power of Nintendo, the Japanese gaming company that popularised the Pokémon series.
To describe Nintendo as a gaming company is perhaps the first mistake. As the games journalist Keza MacDonald writes in Super Nintendo,her love letter to the company, Nintendo Yamauchi began as a playing-card company, founded in 1889. Oscar Wilde, Vincent van Gogh and Otto von Bismarck could have played Nintendo together (if they’d had the inclination, a pack of ornate hanafuda cards, and someone to tell them how to play). In the 1960s it began to make small plastic tracks on which model cars or marbles would race. In 1966, the company’s president, Hiroshi Yamauchi, was visiting his card factory when he saw a device that one of the engineers, Gunpei Yokoi, had made in his spare time. The “Ultra Hand”, as Yokoi called it, was an extendable grabber that wasn’t really useful, but which had a certain characteristic silliness; it asked to be played with. Yamauchi told Yokoi to turn it into a product; more than a million Ultra Hands were sold.
Yokoi was given freedom, but not a lot of money, to experiment with new ideas. Nintendo became a successful producer of toys that made inventive use of what was available – “withered technology”, as Yokoi called it. This is still how Nintendo makes games and consoles: it does not offer a machine made of the most powerful components, as Microsoft and Sony do with their Xbox and PlayStation consoles. Instead it concentrates on the long-term appeal of characters and worlds that are mostly non-violent and toylike, such as the Mario and Zelda franchises. The typical approach of a Nintendo game is that the character is in front of the player’s view, like a toy held in the hand. This, paired with a genius for physics and level design, is part of what has made its games easy to master. They are built to be an extension of the imaginative play people learn as very small children.
The whimsical characters of Shigeru Miyamoto – an artist who had made his own toys since childhood and joined the company in 1977 – were added to Yokoi’s inventive designs. The first of these characters was Jumpman, the hero of the Donkey Kong arcade game, who was designed to make the simplest use of the technology, with the minimum number of pixels used to represent overalls and a moustache. In the United States, Nintendo’s games were kept in a warehouse owned by a comically abrasive landlord, Mario, who became well known through the company, and for whom the character was renamed.
By the early 1990s, Nintendo was the leading console manufacturer; the “Famicom” (family computer), released in the US and Europe in 1985 as the Nintendo Entertainment System, could be found in almost a third of American households by the end of the decade. But as its successor, the Super Nintendo, was arriving in the market, the US game developers John Carmack and John Romero were preparing to release a title that would define a new genre of video games. Wolfenstein 3D, released for personal computers, was the first successful first-person shooter (FPS) – a game in which the player sees the gameplay from the character’s point of view. The FPS is not like playing with a toy. It simulates the experience of using a gun. Wolfenstein 3D and successors such as Doom and Quake were popular because they played up to the transgressive idea on which the FPS was based: it is software designed to give the user some sense of what it would look and sound and feel like to shoot someone.
Wolfenstein 3D came with a mock rating – “Profound Carnage” – that advertised its selling point. The Nazi soldiers that were the game’s enemies died screaming, blood spraying from their wounds. But it now looks quaint in comparison to later first-person shooters. The big selling point of Soldier of Fortune (2000) was the chance to shoot an enemy’s limbs from their body. In 2003, Postal 2 offered players a first-person simulation of the indiscriminate killing of civilians. In Manhunt (also 2003) players could suffocate an enemy with a plastic bag or torture them to death. When the Duke Nukem franchise was revived in 2011, its gameplay included a level in which the player was expected to execute half-naked women who had been forcibly impregnated by aliens. (The player could also urinate on them.) The question that has always been asked by such games is: how far can this be taken?
The industry also seemed to be asking this question, even as it became a global corporate structure worth hundreds of billions. In 2014, I arrived in Cologne to attend Europe’s largest trade show for the video games industry. Early one morning, I walked along an avenue that had been hung with red banners. On the banners were white circles containing angular black symbols – not swastikas, which were then illegal to display in Germany, but near enough. The banners were being used to advertise the latest title in the Wolfenstein series. It was a haunting experience to walk along that street, in a German city, to see the regime against which both my grandfathers had fought resurrected as a marketing stunt for a video game.
The same year, the gaming community – or rather, that part of it that was comprised of mostly young men who had spent their childhoods immersed in simulated violence and internet communities – found politics. Under the flimsy, transparent banner of exposing ties between (female) games developers and the media, the “gamergate” movement allowed these men to indulge a new form of transgression: the harassment and intimidation of women in the real world. The political strategist Steve Bannon was early to recognise the potential power of this newly coordinated online community, which he credited with recruiting “rootless white males” to the Maga movement. Today, terms from PC gaming are widespread in political discourse. For Dominic Cummings and Elon Musk, political opponents are “NPCs” (non-player characters); in gaming these are simple bots, to be ignored or destroyed as the player sees fit. The ideas underlying the games Nintendo develops seem to be the opposite. In Mario’s animistic universe, everything – mushrooms, stars, bullets, plants – has eyes and legs and personality.
It would be whacky to claim that PC gaming is behind the darkness in modern politics. Nor would it be sensible to say that Nintendo has special claim to a higher moral ground. Plenty of violent games are available on Nintendo’s consoles; the James Bond spin-off FPS GoldenEye was one of its biggest hits in the 1990s. Nintendo is a carefully run commercial enterprise that has made its executives and investors vast sums. Practically alone among large technology companies, it has no debts and retains ¥1.9trn in cash on hand (about £9bn). But Nintendo has also made itself unique in avoiding in its own games the violent individualism on which the rest of the industry is largely based.
Several times in the business of writing about games, I’ve had to attend a lecture or discussion with some puffed-up auteur about how their very serious triple-A title – produced at vast expense, using the latest hardware, always involving guns – was as much a work of art as a serious film. Typically, the claim to art status was based on the fact that the main character was a novelist, or that there was a sequence that took place in a dream, or that there was just a lot of rain. They were always wrong: what they had made were just badly scripted interactive films. Art, in a video game, is found in the kind of idiosyncratic fun that Nintendo has spent decades obsessively crafting – it is not in how impressive it looks, but in how wonderfully it plays.
Super Nintendo: How One Japanese Company Helped the World Have Fun
Keza MacDonald
Guardian Faber, 304pp, £20
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[Further reading: Uncovering Russia’s dark soul]
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This article appears in the 25 Feb 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The Crumbling Crown
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