Image: Damien McFerran / Nintendo Life
In the introduction to Super Nintendo: How One Japanese Company Helped the World Have Fun, Keza MacDonald makes a easy promise: over the course of the following 12 chapters, you will learn one thing you did not already know.
It’s the form of gauntlet-laying that may have any self-respecting Nintendo fan click on their knuckles and shut their Bulbapedia tab in a ‘problem accepted’ form of manner. And but, 250 pages later, I can truthfully say that it rang true.
‘Super Nintendo’, to deliver it down from its correct title, is the story of the corporate that everyone knows and love; it is also the story of us, people, and the way we play. The Guardian’s Video Games Editor and former Editor-in-Chief at Kotaku UK compiles interviews with nearly each Nintendo inventive you’ll be able to consider (and those you’ll be able to’t) to elucidate how among the trade’s most iconic collection got here to be, whereas additionally reflecting on why these collection are essential in wider tradition.
It’s complete however by no means too dense, informative however approachable, and filled with an unwavering ardour for Nintendo that I’d wager even the corporate’s largest detractors would discover infectious. In quick, if you wish to study Nintendo, that is the ebook to do it.
Image: Damien McFerran / Nintendo Life
Strictly talking, this is not a chronological walkthrough from A to B. It begins with the toy manufacturing of the Nineteen Sixties and ’70s and ends with the event of Splatoon, however every game-focused chapter in between serves as a jumping-off level to elucidate one thing bigger in regards to the firm as a complete.
A chapter on Donkey Kong delves into the early design processes of a little-known artist known as Shigeru Miyamoto. A Metroid part additionally serves to dissect gender illustration in each Nintendo video games and the broader trade. Animal Crossing acts as a primary case research demonstrating Nintendo’s behavior of sticking with an thought till its viewers finds it.
Be it the story of smash-hit successes like Wii Sports, or the corporate’s extra off-the-wall moments like LABO (no, LABO wasn’t only a fever dream), the ebook presents the House of Mario not as an organization that is out of contact with rivals, however one which’s at all times trying to what’s subsequent — even when ‘subsequent’ is a cardboard piano.
The Nintendo fanboy in me at all times likes viewing the corporate in relation to the bigger trade, and MacDonald does a pleasant job of balancing the micro particulars of sport growth with the larger image. There are loads of locations which you could search for deep dives into particular titles and their growth, however Super Nintendo actually shines in showcasing the private touches.
Image: Damien McFerran / Nintendo Life
Take the chapter on Kirby, which is used as a manner into discussing the much-missed Satoru Iwata. It’s a poignant and heartfelt tribute shining the sunshine as a lot on Iwata the person as Iwata the designer — the company president, laptop programmer, and gamer, to paraphrase his iconic introductory quote. By compiling phrases from Miyamoto, Itoi and others near him (primarily from Hobonichi’s fantastic ebook, Ask Iwata), MacDonald balances Iwata’s industrial and private impacts. It’s becoming that the chapter ends on Miyamoto’s reminiscences of their late-night meals and shared sweets reasonably than spectacular gross sales figures for Wii and DS.
The ebook is constructed on one of the complete collections of interviews that I’ve seen in a very long time, many from MacDonald herself. The veteran journalist throws out tidbits from her chats with Miyamoto, Aonuma, Tezuka, and others, pulling from different works when she did not have an opportunity to take a seat down with the inventive in query. Super Nintendo threads every perspective collectively right into a cohesive entire, and it feels such as you’re getting a peek behind the wizard’s curtain, catching a glimpse of all of the previous builders turning wheels and flipping switches whereas the top end result appears to be like like magic from the surface.
There are numerous little inner-working nuggets peppered all through the ebook, and I do not need to spoil them right here, however it’s thrilling to listen to among the firm’s longest-serving designers speak anecdotally about their perceptions of choose merchandise lengthy earlier than they launched. Shinya Takahashi has an inventory of manufacturing credit so long as your arm, so studying about his pre-launch worries in regards to the Switch, about how he wasn’t absolutely on board with the enchantment of the design till the primary time he moved a prototype from docked to handheld, is fascinating.
Image: Damien McFerran / Nintendo Life
Well-worn tales of Miyamoto’s Zelda inspiration stemming from his time exploring forests as a toddler are combined with lesser-known particulars, like Koizumi confessing he designed Mario Sunshine’s splashy concentrate on the again of his reminiscences of summer season holidays spent by the water. You’ll discover a variety of these anecdotes elsewhere, however I extremely doubt that you have learn all of them.
By threading them into the story of the corporate, Super Nintendo proves to be a really satisfying abstract of an organization that’s ever-changing and ever-growing. If this ebook places one factor above all others throughout, it is that Nintendo’s sense of enjoyable, and our sense of play, will ceaselessly be its most interesting function.
Thanks to Faber for sending a sophisticated copy. Super Nintendo: How One Japanese Company Helped the World Have Fun launches in North America on third February 2026 and within the UK on twelfth February 2026. It is offered now to pre-order.
Jim got here to Nintendo Life in 2022 and, regardless of his insistence that The Minish Cap is one of the best Zelda sport and his unwavering love for the Star Wars prequels (sure, actually), he has continued to jot down information and options on the location ever since.
