[Pokémon
Go, this month’s gaming phenomenon, came about only because Nintendo has gone
years without a hit and was forced to find partners. In this case it teamed up
with Niantic Inc., an American start-up that was once part of Google and
provides the technology that puts Pikachu and its bestial friends in the real
world.]
By Paul Mozur
and Jonathan Soble
 |
A
Pokémon character on a street in
The
augmented-reality game came about because Nintendo has gone
years
without a hit and was forced to find partners.
CreditOlivia Harris/Getty
Images |
HONG
KONG — A video game featuring combative little critters called Pokémon hits
mobile devices, and millions of fans are hooked. Players around the world search
for rare and valuable Pokémon and connect with each other to do battle.
Today?
That was 18 years ago.
Nintendo,
the Japanese video game company that helped start the current Pokémon Go craze,
first shook up the industry in 1998, when the original version of Pokémon
became a surprise hit in America. That version, played on its Game Boy portable
game device, presaged the current era of smartphone games, a world where titles
like Candy Crush and Clash of Clans command billion-dollar price tags.
Nintendo
— which took an early lead in mobile gaming and then proceeded to blow it —
offers a lesson in how corporate cultures can make or break a company, especially
those that are pioneers in a field. Nintendo’s drive has helped the Kyoto-based
company produce some of the world’s most beloved games and play a major role in
creating the modern global video game industry.
Yet
that same stubbornness and perfectionism led to missed opportunities. It
skipped smart phones and app stores and dismissed partnering with other
companies with potentially better ideas. If Nintendo is easily likened to Apple
for its autocratic insistence on groundbreaking innovation, it is also like
Xerox in that it has failed to take advantage of ideas as valuable as the mouse.
Pokémon
Go, this month’s gaming phenomenon, came about only because Nintendo has gone
years without a hit and was forced to find partners. In this case it teamed up
with Niantic Inc., an American start-up that was once part of Google and
provides the technology that puts Pikachu and its bestial friends in the real
world.
“It’s
quite a big change,” said Serkan Toto, a game industry consultant in Tokyo
A
Nintendo spokesman declined to comment.
Nintendo
has shown before that it can adapt. It got its start making playing cards in 1889.
By the 1970s it was designing video games, leading to the release of the Donkey
Kong video game machine in 1981.
Many
of its ideas offered a glimpse into the future of video games. In 1983, it
added a modem port to the home video game console that would eventually become
the popular Nintendo Entertainment System, decades ahead of a time when Xbox
and PlayStation gamers connect with one another around the world.
“They
were pushing the envelope so much earlier than anyone realizes,” said Jeff Ryan,
author of the book “Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America.”
Nintendo
was still riding high on the success of its video game consoles in 1998 when it
released the first Pokémon hand-held video game in America
Nintendo
assumed Pokémon would not catch on in America: “It was role-playing, with
minimal graphics, battles that ended with one fighter ‘fainting’ instead of
dying, and an obsessive compulsive goal of finding 150 critters wandering in
the woods,” Mr. Ryan wrote.
But
it also had cutting-edge innovations. Players could connect their Game Boys
with a cable to battle each other, foreshadowing today’s connected mobile games.
It was also an early example of what the gaming industry would come to call
casual games: Games that can be put down and picked up again whenever the user
likes.
Many
games of the era had an end, like a big villain to defeat, that players could
race to if they focused on the game for hours or days. Even after collecting
all the Pokémon and defeating increasingly powerful opponents, a player could
keep playing and battling friends.
The
game sold more than 200 million copies, according to Nintendo, and spawned a
cartoon television show and a lucrative line of Pokémon trading cards.
Smart
phones seemed like a natural fit for Pokémon when they emerged more than a
decade later. The Pokémon Company, which owns the Pokémon characters and is
partially owned by Nintendo, released a free app game to promote the trading
cards in 2011. But Nintendo said it would not sell games on any app stores.
Changes
in the game industry made that increasingly difficult. A growing number of
gamers were casual gamers who did not have all day to sit in front of a console
in their homes. While Nintendo’s Wii console, with its motion controller, was a
hit, its successor, the Wii U, was a disappointment.
Nintendo
was at a crossroads in other ways. In 2013, its longtime president, Hiroshi
Yamauchi, died. Last year, Satoru Iwata, a former Nintendo chief executive and
a game designer who supported the Pokémon Go project, also died.
Pokémon
Go demonstrates that Nintendo’s stable of characters — which also includes the
mustachioed plumber Mario, a princess named Zelda, and her savior, Link — can
form the basis for others to develop lucrative mobile games. But that would
turn Nintendo into a different kind of company — one, Mr. Ryan says, that is
content to hit singles and doubles rather than swing for the fences.
“It
would make them a ton of money and it would secure their reputation for 100
years,” he said. “But it would also not make them Nintendo anymore.”
Paul
Mozur reported from Hong
Kong and Jonathan
Soble from Tokyo