How Nintendo Helped Create (And Beat) The Yakuza

by Benjamin Richardson
nintendo mario
Nintendo

Though Nintendo had fought off organised crime through their dusk drama, shopkeepers weren't so lucky with the disorganised chaos which followed that morning. Such was the frenzy for the undersupplied Super Famicom that the Japanese government later told Nintendo to only release consoles at weekends in the future. They were happy to accept the reprimand. Some bureaucratic censure was a small price to pay for one of the most successful hardware launches ever.

There's an ironic denouement to this story. Some fifteen years later, the bitter war between the Kyoto giants and Sega was over, the latter squeezed out of the hardware market by the same force which ultimately meant Nintendo never had to devise such a sneaky launch again: Sony's PlayStation. Now happy to cooperate, Sega's Toshihiro Nagoshi approached Nintendo with a new pitch: a satire of Japanese organised crime, known as... you guessed it... Yakuza.

Nintendo, perhaps reflecting on their past, politely declined. They'd been betrayed by such an association once before, after all.

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Editorial Team
Editorial Team

Benjamin was born in 1987, and is still not dead. He variously enjoys classical music, old-school adventure games (they're not dead), and walks on the beach (albeit short - asthma, you know). He's currently trying to compile a comprehensive history of video game music, yet denies accusations that he purposefully targets niche audiences. He's often wrong about these things.