Forget the music and film industries, Mario and co earn more than double every year

Even if your knowledge of video games begins and ends with Tetris or Pong (the pioneering, rudimentary tennis-style game from the early 1970s) I bet you know who Mario is. The moustachioed plumber created by the Japanese company Nintendo is the star of numerous games as well as hit movies featuring a galaxy of Hollywood stars. A 1990 survey found that Mario was more recognisable to American kids than Mickey Mouse.

Miles ahead: The gaming industry generated an estimated $184.4 billion in 2022

Keza MacDonald has been a Mario fan since 1994 when she was six and she and her brother were given a Nintendo console and a Super Mario game for Christmas. They played it until their parents pulled the plug from the wall but by that time MacDonald had fallen in love with gaming. She ran a game fan site as a teenager, got a job on a games magazine when she was 16 and now, 20 years later, has written a fascinating history of Nintendo.

Fascinating even if you’re not a ‘gamer’? True, gamers are more likely to read this book than those who still think of Pac-Man as cutting edge, but consider the cultural force that games have become.

In terms of revenue, the video gaming industry is worth more than twice the music and film industries combined. According to a Forbes report, the gaming industry generated an estimated $184.4 billion, while the music industry generated $26.2 billion and the movies generated $26 billion in box office revenue.

There are more than three billion video game players worldwide. Certainly a phenomenon worth knowing about.

Nintendo was founded more than 130 years ago as a manufacturer of ‘hanafuda’, a type of Japanese playing cards. It began experimenting with electronic and mechanical toys in the 1960s and then moved on to games. In 1977, it made its first home games console, which offered several variations of Pong.

Then a brilliant employee called Shigeru Miyamoto came up with an idea for a game based on a love triangle between an ape, a carpenter and his girlfriend. Donkey Kong, released in 1981, was unlike anything else around, a mesmerising puzzle of platforms, ladders, fireballs and barrels. It was the highest-grossing arcade game in the world for two years running, making Nintendo more than $1 billion in today’s money.

 MacDonald, writing with the enthusiasm of a convert and the clarity of a good reporter, guides us through Nintendo’s history by focusing on the development of its best known games – Donkey Kong, Super Mario, Animal Crossing and so on. She highlights some of the colourful key figures associated with the company, such as its beloved fourth president Satoru Iwata. 

During a period of commercial difficulty, he halved his own salary and reduced payouts to the board of directors. When he died in 2015, more than 4,000 mourners braved a typhoon to attend his funeral in Kyoto.

Unlike many of its old rivals such as Sega and Atari, Nintendo still makes both games and consoles. It has more than $13 billion in cash. Japan is home to the world’s most venerable companies, some more than 1,000 years old. Mario and pals could be around for quite some time.