A Story Collection

The Birth of the Famicom

The people behind the machine — read in order, like a book.

Before the Famicom was a machine, it was a chain of decisions — made by a handful of people who, for the most part, never met the millions of children those decisions would reach. A president who never played games. An engineer who built the box and spent his last years asking what it had meant. An artist with a tape measure in his pocket. And the makers who filled the red-and-white box with worlds.

Read in order, these are the human stories behind one small red-and-white machine — and the lives it quietly rearranged. Perhaps, somewhere in here, your own.

8 stories · read in order

1927–1949 Hiroshi Yamauchi One Condition Kyoto, 1949 — a twenty-one-year-old takes the company, and asks for it cleared of his own family. When Hiroshi Yamauchi was five, his father walked out. At twenty-one he took over Nintendo on a single condition — that he be the only family member inside it. The cousin was let go. Read this chapter →
1949–2013 Hiroshi Yamauchi The King Who Never Played He gave a generation its games, and kept none of it for himself. Hiroshi Yamauchi ran Nintendo for 53 years and commanded the Famicom into being — yet he never played video games, and never once watched the baseball team he owned. The cold, certain will behind a generation's joy. Read this chapter →
1971–2021 Masayuki Uemura The Man Who Asked What He'd Built July 15, 1983 — a red-and-white box, ¥14,800 Masayuki Uemura designed the Famicom after a late-night call from his president: price it so low no competitor can follow for a year. He delivered. Read this chapter →
1952–present Shigeru Miyamoto The Cave and the Garden Summer, circa 1961 — Sonobe, Kyoto Shigeru Miyamoto spent a summer exploring a cave as a child — with a lantern he built himself. That feeling became The Legend of Zelda. Read this chapter →
1983–1987 Hironobu Sakaguchi The Final Wager December 18, 1987 — Tokyo Hironobu Sakaguchi planned to quit gaming if his next game failed. He called it Final Fantasy. That title turned out to be the opposite of the truth. Read this chapter →
1975–2003 Yasuhiro Fukushima The Contest That Made Dragon Quest Autumn 1982 — Tokyo, Japan Fukushima had never played a video game. He ran a contest paying 10x the going rate in 1982 — and Dragon Quest walked through the door. Read this chapter →
1931–2021 Koichi Sugiyama The Postcard Tokyo, circa 1984 Koichi Sugiyama almost did not mail the card. His wife mailed it. That feedback postcard to Enix in 1984 led directly to Dragon Quest legendary score. Read this chapter →
1984–2026 Takashi Tezuka The Man Who Stayed Behind the Curtain 1984–2026 — Osaka to Kyoto, forty-two years 1984–2026 — Osaka to Kyoto, forty-two years Read this chapter →