Professional MoronBook of da Month #2: Super Nintendo by Keza MacDonald 👾
This is a great fun, uplifting historical account of legendary games developer Nintendo. Keza MacDonald’s book explores the gaming giant’s history, including detailed looks into their biggest franchises, alongside exclusive interviews with the company’s creative geniuses.
MacDonald is an English journalist and she’s currently the editor of The Guardian’s gaming department. Super Nintendo launched in February 2026 and is a lively, engaging read for any fan of the company. Innit.
Super Nintendo: How One Japanese Company Helped the World Have Fun
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdTZ8d1-xpI?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en&autohide=2&wmode=transparent&w=723&h=407]There are plenty of gaming books these days, but for a long time it was David Sheff’s Game Over (1993) that was the pinnacle of that genre. That book was about Nintendo’s rise to gaming domination in the 1980s.
MacDonald doesn’t try to recreate that here, instead focussing her efforts on why Nintendo continues to be so successful. Its Switch 2 console launched in June 2025 and is the fastest selling console in history, shifting over 17 million units worldwide before December 2025.
There’s a reason for all that. In the modern gaming world, Nintendo stands out with its business and creative philosophy. It takes its time with games, will happily delay things if necessary, and ignore almost all AAA big blockbuster trends going on with Sony and Microsoft’s consoles (the PlayStation and Xbox series).
Where Sony and Microsoft obsess over the most powerful possible consoles, and focus on massive blockbuster 300+ hour AAA games with the best available graphics, Nintendo ignores that entirely.
The focus is fun. Plain and simple, a philosophy in place since its former president Hiroshi Yamauchi (1927-2013) hired Gunpei Yokoi in 1965. Yokoi’s gleeful sense of creativity with toys and electronics led to various success stories.
One of the first things he invented was the Ultra Hand. Created in 1966, it’s capable of stretching out over large distances to grab stuff. It sold very well, shifting over a million units, and cemented Yokoi’s position in the business.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mr0u1ipExM8?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en&autohide=2&wmode=transparent&w=723&h=407]Yamauchi saw the rise of arcade units in the 1970s, and the success of Atari, and led Nintendo in that direction. He hired Shigeru Miyamoto in 1977. He went on to create the Donkey Kong arcade unit and then Super Mario, with the NES transforming Nintendo into a household name.
Meanwhile, Yokoi (1941-1997) invented the Game & Watch series and then his masterpiece… the Game Boy! It sold over 118 million units worldwide.
How One Japanese Company Helped the World Have Fun takes some time to explore Miyamoto’s creative vision, well worth exploring as he’s arguably the most important creative in video game history.
We’ll get to him in a moment, but it’s worth looking into why gamers continue to flock to the company. We first played one of their games circa 1989 (Mario Bros.) and we’re addicted straight away. Nintendo remains our gaming choice, no matter what Sony or Microsoft come up with we come back to Nintendo on the simple basis of the games being exceptional and great fun.
MacDonald covers her own interest in all this across the opening chapter. She really catches the appeal of gaming and how it draws you in for a lifelong passion.
“Nintendo remains fascinating to me and why it’s stayed throughout my life: it has a knack for surprises, for coming out with something unexpected. It may seem weird that fully grown adults would continue to love games that are overtly and unashamedly family-friendly, but for some Nintendo fans that’s the point: Nintendo represents an uncomplicatedly fun approach to video games, a brick bridge back to the simple joy and excitement of childhood play in a world that is increasingly pressured and fraught.”
And this on the Japanese gaming giant’s business philosophy:
“Where other publishers have started darkly manipulating the form with exploitative microtransactions or dark-pattern engagement techniques borrowed from the gambling industry – Zynga, one of the world’s biggest mobile gamer companies, has proudly boasted on record about how much it encourages its players to spend – Nintendo has remained resolutely and refreshingly un-corporate about the business of fun. Delight comes first, profit second.”
It’s one of the reasons why it doesn’t bother even trying to compete with Sony and Microsoft. They do their own thing, Nintendo is off elsewhere being innovative rather than maxxing out the most powerful specs—a design philosophy that makes its hardware more affordable.
This innovation can backfire sometimes, such as with the Wii U console from 2012 (a big failure by Nintendo’s standards), but then it bounced back with the Switch and Switch 2 concepts. So its innovation can be hit and miss (usually the former), but the company is rarely afraid to experiment around with its hardware and franchises.
Oh, and much of that success is down to one man’s creative brilliance.
The Genius of Shigeru Miyamoto
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mg-2EcAYjZo?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en&autohide=2&wmode=transparent&w=723&h=407]Think of Miyamoto as the Steven Spielberg of gaming. Mario, Zelda, Pikmin, Donkey Kong etc. He’s not a programmer, but is a games designer with an incredible capacity to just know what he’s doing.
He’s a shy man and unassuming, never commanding a big salary (which he could have easily demanded) and for most of his career at Nintendo he cycled in each morning. He has a goofy sense of fun, too, and seems a bit awkward at public events, but goes anyway to be present and enjoy the occasion. We would not be surprised at all if he’s neurodivergent, given he’s such a unique person.
It’s like his talent is inherent. Former Nintendo president Satoru Iwata (1959-2015) said of him:
“I think most people out there think of Miyamoto as an artist – something of a genius, who puts stock inspiration and thinks with the right side of his brain, coming up with unlikely observations one after another, as if guided by divine inspiration … Miyamoto is an extremely logical person. But that’s not all. His mind is capable of both extraordinarily logical, left-brained considerations and the sort of speeding-bullet thinking you might hear from someone who has pursued a career in the arts.”
MacDonald adds further clarity to Miyamoto’s visual way of thinking:
“According to Iwata, who was one of his closet friends and collaborators, Miyamoto is almost uniquely able to understand both the technical and artistic sides of games development, whether he’s looking at the design of a console or the games that we’re going to play on the console.
‘It’s as if one second he’s using a magnifying glass and the next instant he’s looking down from 10,000 feet overhead.’ Iwata wrote. Miyamoto has never formally studied computers, programming, hardware, or electronics, but working side by side at Nintendo with people who specialise in these things, he has acquired a deep understanding of what computers are good at and what they’re not good at, what’s possible and what’s not …
His ability to understand the principles of programming and work with them, rather than seeing his design or artistic vision as something that’s in opposition to the limitations of the technology, is key to that sense of wholeness that the best Nintendo games have, the feeling that every element of the game is feeding into the same goal: making the player feel good.”
Miyamoto is 73 now and acts as more of a guiding creative force than active project lead. This isn’t anything new, either, as he hasn’t led a Mario project since Super Mario 64 back in the mid-1990s.
After that landmark game, the benchmark for 3D gaming for years to come, he busied himself with the equally groundbreaking Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998). It’s still regarded as one of the best games of all time.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cu_ZtGP2oeM?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en&autohide=2&wmode=transparent&w=723&h=407]Two massive games from the ’90s. Every modern game that launches now is based on the game design principles set out in those two N64 games.
Since then, he’s been hugely instrumental instilling his creative philosophy into Nintendo, so it does set the company up for a bright creative future. The younger generation of game designers have clearly mastered his way of things, as the latest batch of Nintendo exclusives has been phenomenal (check out Donkey Kong Bananza to see why).
More recently he helped design the Nintendo theme park in Japan. He’s still there doing his thing, then, a guiding spirit for business. One who has trained new employees in his particular, singular ways of creativity.
An Exploration of Nintendo’s Storied Franchises
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unF6tSrcprk?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en&autohide=2&wmode=transparent&w=723&h=407]After the book’s introduction, each subsequent chapter explores iconic Nintendo franchises:
- Super Mario
- Zelda
- Metroid
- Pikmin
- Animal Crossing
- Splatoon
- Smash Bros
- Pokémon
Nintendo fans may be quite familiar with the details MacDonald presents here, but she goes into strong detail into how each game came to be. Including the sometimes tortuous, meticulous approach needed to create games as good as this. The first Metroid game (trailer above) is a classic example of that.
When it launched in 1986, in the credits there’s a thank you note to three local restaurants that kept the design team fed during long hours.
We found all these sections revealing and enjoyable, but we did know quite a lot of the information already. However! MacDonald’s exclusive interviews with key staff members keeps How One Japanese Company Helped the World Have Fun a breezy, life-affirming read.
Well worth your time if you’re a fan of the company. But also, embedded in these pages, are a business philosophy of merging huge success alongside genuine creative integrity. A rare combination in the modern business world.
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