Foreword

By Don James

Executive Vice President, Operations

Nintendo of America Inc.

Just out of college, I was picking up a letter of recommendation for the work I had done designing a coin-op cabinet for Far East Video, which had become the fledgling Nintendo of America. They offered me a position as a warehouse manager and I thought, “Sure, it’s a job.” That was 35 years ago.

One of my first memories as a Nintendo of America employee is looking at a game called Donkey Kong in our lobby, and along with our President, coming up with the name Mario for the main character, who was then called Jumpman. Yeah, I’m one of the two guys who named Mario.

We took a big gamble kick-starting the US home video game industry after it had crashed in the early 1980s. It took a lot of time and effort by many loyal and dedicated Nintendo employees. I was one of the employees who moved to New Jersey for three-and-half months to launch the Nintendo Entertainment System into the New York market. It was an experience I will never forget.

The Nintendo warehouse was located in Hackensack, NJ and it was, to say the least, sparse on amenities. There were rats and snakes inside the building, and we even had a barrel of some sort of dangerous, toxic substance roll into the parking lot, which an individual in a hazmat suit had to come and take away. Hence we all referred to our warehouse affectionately as “Rats and Snakes and Toxic Waste.”

A small team built the Point of Purchase displays at night, loaded them into vans with NES Deluxe Bundles, and delivered them to retail outlets. Every morning we would all gather at a huge map of the New York area, which included Long Island and New Jersey, and plan the routes each of our four vans would take. The vans left full and returned empty, only to repeat the whole process the next day. In those three-and-a-half months, we worked 18 hours a day, 7 days a week.

When we were adapting the Japanese Famicom into what would become the Nintendo Entertainment System, I remember standing in the warehouse, which was filled with coin-op arcade games, and talking to our VP of sales. He said, “Don, do you have any idea what will happen to the company if this product takes off?” At the time I didn’t think much about it, but looking back, it was the start of a truly epic journey for myself and the many fans of Nintendo’s products and characters.

In the years since, many chapters have been added to the Nintendo story. We’ve come a long way since the days of Rats and Snakes and Toxic Waste. With this book, and the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System: NES Classic Edition console, I am excited to relive some of my own memories of those exciting early days. I hope you are, too!