Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America

I loved this book. It was delightful, informative and brought back so many fond memories. I thought it struck the right balance of giving facts and history while still keeping it entertaining and engaging.

That Mario really gets around.

I learned a lot of details about the history of video games in the United States from this book. I gained a lot of respect for 宮本 茂 (Shigeru Miyamoto) by learning how he got started and how much of what I loved in the games I grew up with came from him.

This book was fun with tons of little facts and stories about the history of Nintendo, like where the name Donkey Kong came from and where the name Nintendo came from.

I'd forgotten that Nintendo has been around since the 1800s, starting as a playing card company. I'd also forgotten just how big the Wii was.

The details in the book were awesome, but at the end, when the author predicted what would come after the Wii for Nintendo, armed with knowledge of the past 5 years, I cringed.

What makes this book great is really its first half. That's exclusively because while the whole book invokes happy nostalgia for me, only the first half really contained things I wasn't aware of. Nintendo of my childhood holds a lot more secrets than Nintendo of post-internet-news-site culture. However, if you don't know anything about the history of Nintendo up to 2010 (when the book was published), you'll enjoy it that much more.

Finding out how Nintendo went from a playing card company to one of the most successful companies in the Earth's history is a great page-turner. The real highlight is finding out just how large an influence Shigeru Miyamoto has had on American and Japanese people born post-1975. It's really amazing, and Jeff Ryan does a great job laying out all the facts about Miyamoto and Nintendo (and eventually Sega, Sony and Microsoft) in a way that's informative, casual and humorous.

This is a great read for anyone who enjoys cultural history and, obviously, anyone who grew up enjoying the art that are video-games.

Some chapters are just a compilation of facts, sometimes the narrative gets a little slow and lacking, but overall, is a fine read.