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 Evolution of an Ape
In 1980 Nintendo was beginning its foray into the arcade industry. Games at the time were pretty much a variation on one another: You shot at things, they shot at you, and eventually you were overwhelmed by either sheer speed or numbers until you lost. Then you entered your name in the high-score memory and challenged your friends to beat you. That was all about to change, though. One of Nintendo's arcade titles, Radarscope, was an unmitigated disaster. No one bothered playing it in arcades; few even bothered to give it more than a passing glance. Hiroshi Yamauchi, the head of Nintendo at the time, needed someone to fix it, but his entire staff was tied up with other projects.
As fate would have it, three years prior to the disaster of Radarscope, Yamauchi received a phone call from an old friend of his named Miyamoto. Miyamoto's 24-year-old son, Shigeru, had just graduated from the Kanazawa Munici College of Industrial Arts and Crafts. Yamauchi granted Shigeru an interview, and after a brief meeting, he hired Shigeru as Nintendo's first staff artist. The fact that Shigeru had grown up without a television didn't seem to faze him. After all, Shigeru had admitted once that most of the time when he was supposed to have been in class, he had actually been playing video games in a local arcade. So, when 1980 rolled around, Nintendo had one crappy game and a staff artist with a bit of free time on his hands. Yamauchi called Shigeru into his office, told him that he was going to be responsible for saving Radarscope, and then sent him on his way. At that point, 27-year-old Shigeru had never created a video game and didn't know how to program.
In perhaps the boldest move in early game development, Shigeru scrapped the Radarscope game entirely. He didn't try to modify or fix it; he just threw the whole thing out. But he couldn't just make any kind of game that he wanted to, because he was limited by the capabilities of the hardware that Radarscope was running on. So Shigeru had mostly free reign, only with no programming skills, a small budget, an even smaller team of Nintendo developers, and a blank screen.
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