I picked up the book Super Nintendo expecting to read about the greatest gaming console of all time. Instead, I got a thoughtful chronicle of the greatest gaming company of all time.

So, still a worthwhile read—particularly for video game historians who want to understand what makes Nintendo so special.

Creativity within Circumstance

Each chapter in the book hones in on a Nintendo franchise, highlighting the teams and creative directors behind each game. We start with Shigeru Miyamoto, the company's most famous designer, and his trio of classic games: Donkey Kong, (Super) Mario Bros., and the Legend of Zelda. His beginnings were also the beginnings of Nintendo as a console and video game maker.

Other chapters feature lesser-known developers helming other core franchises under very different constraints. Metroid, for instance, owes its visual design to Hiroji Kiyotake, a designer who had never finished a complete game. Its art style was inspired by the movie Alien and H. R. Giger, resulting in an artistic tone unlike any other Nintendo franchise. Or take Kirby, a character created by Masahiro Sakurai at HAL Laboratory during a tough financial stretch. The character's success would eventually lead to some of Nintendo's best years, a decade later—HAL's CEO would be promoted to the President of Nintendo Corporation^[1], while Sakurai would go on to direct another acclaimed series^[2].

Later in the book, as we enter into the 21st century, the circumstances shift from struggling with technical limitations to standing out in a field of abundance. Splatoon is the notable series here, where its creators Hisashi Nogami and Shinya Takahashi talk about building a family-friendly shooter, but also incorporating street fashion and experimental rock music to give the game its unique aesthetic. Nintendo Labo was another relatively recent experiment that explored the possibilities of motion controls and IR sensors, built around recyclable cardboard.

Horizontal Consoles, Vertical Franchises

Throughout Nintendo's storied 40+ year run as a gaming company, they are known for two things: innovative consoles, and timeless franchises. Their consoles are neat pieces of hardware—rarely at the cutting edge on raw processing power, but often introducing new controls or mechanics (e.g., analog stick with the N64, portable/docked dual modes on the Switch). Many of these innovations are then copied by other console manufacturers, and over time adoption turns to standardization across the industry.

But the threads that connect through all of Nintendo's hardware are the franchises. For every new console launch, there is usually a Mario or a Zelda game to lead the way, to attract their fanbase to a new piece of hardware. Then as the cycle matures, other mainstays of the Nintendo franchise stable make an appearance: an Animal Crossing game here, a Pokemon spin-off there, and occasionally a Metroid remaster. It's predictable, but it's also a playbook that has served the company well since, well, their Super Nintendo days.

The games in each series act as artifacts, snapshots in time that reflect its developers, their creativity and inspirations, the possibilities made available with hardware, and even the state of the industry. Of all of Nintendo's franchises, Zelda has been their most experimental, often yielding legendary results:

• The original Legend of Zelda created an open world for players to explore, so big that it had to include a battery to save players' progress;
• A Link to the Past showed off the capabilities of the then-new SNES console, rendering a game world that was many times bigger, twice over;
• The Ocarina of Time set the standard, in a single game, for 3D gameplay and combat—the N64 controller felt like it was designed specifically for this game along with Super Mario 64;
• Four Swords, to be played by connecting four (!!) Game Boy Advances with a Gamecube;
• Breath of the Wild again reset expectations on player freedom in an open world, expanding in scope and scale—climbable mountains, impactful physics, and a tight gameplay loop rewarding unfettered exploration.

Through all these innovations and ideas, familiar cornerstones anchor each game: Zelda and Link, Hyrule^[3], the Master Sword and the Triforce. The stability of the franchise is precisely what gives developers space to make new experiences.

Avoiding the Nostalgia Trap

It would have been easy to rely on nostalgia and prior interviews to assemble a credible retelling of the last 3–4 decades of Nintendo. Hell, it'd be even easier—as many game-focused books do—to spend the pages recalling the author's gaming experiences as the primary narrative device. I appreciate Super Nintendo because the author put in the work to include their own research and reporting, so readers have the additional context around each chapter's themes.

It's hard to imagine a similar book, written in this format of franchises and the development stories within them, about any other company. Nintendo's combination of enduring quality, longevity, and popularity is unique—and wholly unmatched in the video game industry. They are one-of-one.