Game Over (Sheff book)
Game Over: How Nintendo Zapped an American Industry, Captured Your Dollars, and Enslaved Your Children is a non-fiction book about the history of the Nintendo electronic gaming company written by David Sheff and published by Random House, New York in 1993. Based on extensive interviews of high-level historical figures, it has provided a research foundation for subsequent works, with a positive critical reception.
Overview
The book details the modern history of Japanese gaming giant Nintendo and its rise to become the most powerful electronic gaming company in the world as of 1993. The book also provides a history of the video gaming industry as a whole from the 1960s to the 1990s.Sheff describes the history of Nintendo since its founding in 1889, focusing in particular on the company's operations in the United States. Seeking to answer how Nintendo became a dominant force in the U.S. video game market, the author describes its business practices and strategy, as well as the controversies surrounding it, including accusations of anti-competitive practices and the alleged harmful effects of games on young people. The book also briefly describes the history of other game companies, such as Atari and Electronic Arts.
Despite the book's title, Sheff's writing is actually fairly neutral: he mainly relates the history of the company while discussing both the positives and negatives of its business practices. Sheff attributes many of Nintendo's successes to what reviewer James Fallows termed "the Japanese system's tolerance for monopoly". Sheff defends the accuracy of the "enslaved your children" portion of the subtitle, stating that "kids will play the games compulsively and non-stop".
The book provides a foundation for subsequent historical research because the author extensively interviewed numerous industry figures, such as Howard Lincoln, Nolan Bushnell, Shigeru Miyamoto, Hiroshi Yamauchi, Minoru Arakawa, Alexey Pajitnov, and anonymous sources.
Background
David Sheff was a journalist previously best known for his interviews with John Lennon and Yoko Ono for Playboy magazine. He became interested in the topic of Nintendo after his son Nic Sheff received a Nintendo Entertainment System console for Christmas, which – according to Sheff – quickly became an "obsession" for the boy and his friends. Sheff convinced the editor-in-chief of Men's Life magazine of his idea, who then sent him on his first trips to Nintendo's headquarters in America and Japan. Initially, Sheff planned to write only an article about Nintendo, but the plan ultimately evolved into writing an entire book.Publication
Prior to the book's publication, its excerpts appeared in San Francisco Focus, Men's Life, Playboy and Rolling Stone magazines. The first edition of the book was published by Random House on March 1, 1993, with the subtitle How Nintendo Zapped an American Industry, Captured Your Dollars, and Enslaved Your Children.Game Over: How Nintendo Conquered the World, an edition published by Vintage Press in 1994, contains a new foreword written by Sheff pertaining to the controversy over video game content in the early 1990s. New subjects discussed in this edition include the controversy over the censored SNES release of Mortal Kombat, the growing competition from Sony, Atari and 3DO, and the announcement of the new Nintendo 64 console.
In 1999, a revised edition of the book titled Game Over: Press Start to Continue – The Maturing of Mario was published by GamePress. It has error corrections as well as photographs and a new chapter written by Andy Eddy which summarizes important events in the game industry since the first edition, such as the advent of video game content rating systems and the inauguration of the Electronic Entertainment Expo. An edited version was printed by Coronet Books and given away free with the May 1999 issue of Arcade magazine.