- Right now at the beginning of this year, one out of every five homes had Nintendo. By the end of this year, one out of every three homes in America will have Nintendo. That's how fast it's growing. - How long did it take you to get blinking again after that? - I don't know. [laughing] You look at yourself, you realize you're a zombie staring into that screen, playing. - It's scary stuff. - Unbelievable. [digital musical motif] - One time the salesperson said they went in to talk about the terms of the sale and that someone [laughing] pulled a gun out of their drawer and set it on the table in front of them to show them how serious they were about not taking a risk. Was definitely a rough chapter. I'm Gail Tilden. I was the advertising manager for Nintendo in 1985. And this is how I helped bring the NES to America. [light hip hop music] When I started at Nintendo, July 11th, 1983, 7-11, it was really a arcade game company, but also we did Game & Watch, little handheld games. My favorite one was called "Flagman." We also had some tabletop games. They looked like mini arcade games. So right after I started, I had my first trip to New York to work with Dentsu, our ad agency back there and make a commercial for "Mario's Cement Factory." At the time, I think there were about 70 people at Nintendo of America, in a way. It was a very, very small group. Famicom came out, not too long after that. We were focused on, I think, "Donkey Kong 3" arcade game, right when I started. But in Japan, they launched the Famicom. We got to see the games, which were really exciting 'cause they seem like they looked like the same quality we had in the arcade. Of course, the design changed when it became the NES. It was really awesome from the beginning. So in 1985, we were dealing with the situation that the video game market had just crashed. There was really a lot of oversupply at retail. And so things were being heavily discounted. You would just walk through the mall and see these bins of closeouts of cartridges that consumers were really seeming to say that they were tired of it, that the games maybe didn't have enough diversity between different games. The over promising of the marketing was leading to things like "ET" came out and there was this huge folklore or urban legend that when it came out, that there was so much oversupply that it ended up going into a landfill somewhere in New Mexico. But actually I think not too long ago, someone actually dug them up to prove that it was true. And the retailers really had suffered from over investing in inventory and oversupply. And so the whole market just kind of had collapsed. It was at that point that we were trying to reenter with what we thought was clearly a better product, really coming in at a time when both the consumers and the retailers felt like video games had been a fad and it was kind of over. So our approach to kind of coming back into the home video market was, we decided to launch in New York only. Kind of biggest city, if-you-can-make-it-there type of thing. So we started in September of 1985 in New York only, and really focused on a deluxe system that had the zapper and it had ROB the Robot before finally rolling out nationally in the end of '86, or Holiday '86. And at that time, when we launched nationally, we also had a Base Set, which included "Mario" and the Deluxe Set that we originally had. So ultimately we took advantage of that killer app with "Mario" for the national launch. Every game and the hardware came with this big poster. It had ROB's head. And surrounding it was a screenshot of every game divided into categories. We kept that poster in there for a long time, till probably the initial library had 15 titles plus the pack ins. Until we probably had over 30 titles, we continued to put that in. Another element that we put in was a card that actually emphasized the quality seal and that Nintendo guaranteed the quality of the product from both an entertainment value and the workmanship of the product. That quality seal at the time, my boss, Ron Judy he's like, "What could we do that would be more like the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval? And that Nintendo Quality Seal, it still appears on every box and on licensed products from lunchboxes to whatever. So that is something that stayed with Nintendo. So when the NES launched, the launch titles being "Duck Hunt" and "Gyromite." Those games were fun. Certainly took advantage of the accessories. And "Mario" was definitely a killer app. I really liked "NES Golf" 'cause I had played that in the arcade version, but I also liked a little kind of puzzle type game called "Clu Clu Land." Another game with a sunglass wearing polar bear called "Ice Climber." A lot of people love "Clu Clu Land." "Clu Clu Land," where are you? [light hip hop music] - When it came to trying to find out what you as consumers would think about the NES, we did a few different focus groups. I would sit behind the mirror and I was the only one who knew how to play. So I would have to come out and demonstrate the product to the kids. And the kids were age range from 8 to 12 or 8 to 14. They seemed interested, like they wanted to see. They wanted to see me demo the robot or the zapper and seemed to me, they were happy and excited. And then we went to New Jersey and one of those sessions, the Nintendo executive team came and watched from behind the glass as well. Did the same thing. And the kids are reacting. And some kid who was very unruly, he drew a picture of a joystick that looked like a penis and held it up to my face on the mirror, he said, "I know you're behind here." [laughing] Anyway, so the Nintendo executives come, they're watching the kids, the kids seem enthused, et cetera. And at the end they ask the moderator what he thinks about the chances for success. And he said, kids are always enthusiastic about a product. So that's not the best way to gauge it. And they said, well, what should we imagine that our success is? He said, well, I've never seen anyone go ahead and launch with this type of result. It was a little worrisome that what we were interpreting as positive, the moderator was interpreting as neutral at best. When the NES came out, even in New York, the retailers had really been burned through all of the close outs of the prior generation. So they were not very receptive to taking in the product. And that really was probably one of the more difficult goals was to get the retailers, to give it shelf space, to have them not be concerned that they won't want to have a lot of markdowns or be stuck with product that they couldn't sell, that they had taken a risk on. So it was really one of the bigger challenges and trying to get them to include the NES in our advertising for the holidays. So the kinds of retailers that we had to work with in the early days, especially since what had happened in the prior generation, a lot of toys stores and that type of retailer were really concerned about working with video games. So a lot of people these days look at that iconic imagery, the way that packaging is that looks old fashioned, like pixels, like graph paper, the way we named things, we made sure not to call it a video game system, that of thing. So when it came to these challenges of trying to get away from the prior generation, there were challenges as related to retail. My challenges were more related to kind of make sure that the consumer and the parents who were purchasing didn't think that it was just more of the same. A group of us went back, there was a group of five or six, and then they brought like five more people back. And, living in temporary apartments, that kind of thing in New Jersey and renting cars and vans and running out and trying to install these big ROB displays at retail and to deliver product to them. And there were times when, they went to the Bronx with a truckload of product and a display. While they're loading in the display, people are looting the car, it was crazy. And back in 1985, New York was much less safe than it is today. So, park the car, get the wheels taken off. Not only was it difficult to get retailers or businesspeople to take a risk on putting a video game system and cartridges on the shelf. But parents had seen that they bought these games for their kids and they didn't even play them. Parents thought, I am not spending more money on a video game when you play it for 10 minutes and then you're not interested. We felt like we really did have a better product, a product that wouldn't disappoint. And we've wanted to put all efforts into making sure the consumer felt like they got their money's worth and that they would want to buy another game when we introduced more software. Some of the things that we did to that end were we called it the Nintendo Entertainment System. And the advertising really focused on the whole family playing together. It's looks pretty corny today, but it's a 1980s family and the dad is playing, and the mom is excited about playing, and two kids. And that type of advertising and positioning was the way that we went. Also putting ROB the Robot first in the sale of the NES or Nintendo Entertainment System, really gave a point of differentiation and made it look like it was more futuristic. And I think we also want to make sure that we would depend on the bug factor, which we called kids bugging their parents to get it, but that the parent would see that this was something that truly was new and different and would be a good investment for the whole family. I think in the early days, making sure that we weren't associated with what had gone on before, that these video games that were just simple blips and used a lot of licenses like "ET," like other major sports or movies, entertainment. They would have a picture from the actual movie, a real person playing tennis on the cover. And then you would open and it would just basically be advanced "Kong." You'd look at the package and then you would play the game and it'd be a complete disconnect. So at the time the packaging that we created to make sure people didn't experience disappointment between the trimmings, if you will, and the actual software was really made on graph paper. It was supposed to represent computer graphics. It's quite blocky and it's kind of iconic today. People really see it as retro, but the whole purpose was that we didn't want to show, beautiful illustrations or photographs of real things on the packaging and then have people say, this game is nothing like this. So if anything, we kind of undersold in order to continue with this consumer satisfaction need and not wanting to ever disappoint. So all kids seemed enthusiastic to us in the focus groups, but the experts told us not to expect too much. We used that in thinking, jeez, we really are going to have to make sure that they think that we present this as new and different things like calling the games, game packs and the entertainment system. And coming up with ROB, your Robotic Operating Buddy. We had a lot of the nomenclature, anything just from the idea of using the word cartridge was something we didn't want to use. So we really tried to come up with ways about demonstrating and visually representing the product that was going to make them understand that this wasn't what they had seen before. So one of the tactics we used to make sure kids could get their hands on the system and actually see it and experience it, that it was something new and different was we did grassroots marketing at mall tours. So we booked these malls around the greater New York area. And we would go in and set up on Friday night and through the weekend we would have the system set up and interesting cabinets, and a big screen, which at the time like a 40" big screen was a big deal. Little platform and a big screen. And on the big screen, we would play "NES Baseball." And we had some stars from the Mets come out and play against the kids. So they would create a line and get to step up and play. And so the two celebrities that we were able to contract with, one was Ron Darling from the Mets who was really a Playboy kind of guy, at the time was very well known and did a lot of promotion. And another guy named Mookie Wilson, And Mookie had a son named Preston, and he would also come to the mall tour. So sometimes he was the most enthusiastic kid and he probably also know how to play the games, the best of anybody by the time we were done. But I remember going to a mall out in Long Island where the mall manager, she just didn't want us there. So she put us like in the basement, in the corner. And she, and I had an all out war over, we had booked this promotion, but she didn't want anything to do with video games and the negative influence that they would have. So she wanted to hide us in the corner. But it was a way of getting out there and getting people to see it and play it and see that it was better than a generation before. And it certainly worked in terms of kids definitely wanted to ask for it for Christmas. And hopefully parents liked it too, and saw that it would be fun. So the team that was back in New York, because it was pretty small, I think in total, there might've been 10 or 12 people, but when we got to the weekend that we were going to actually launch and the product was going to go out to retail, night that it came in and we were ready to go. We had Ron Judy and Bruce Lowry was the VP of sales, Mr. Arakawa our president and Howard Lincoln, our senior VP were all back there with us and we loaded up the truck in the warehouse and opened a bottle of champagne that we drank out of styrofoam cups. [laughing] And we were in New Jersey. And off went the truck for delivery. So the next morning, a few of us went and stood outside of the FAO Schwarz. The system was all set up. And we waited for people to come in and make that first sale. So someone comes in and they not only buy the system, but they buy like every game. And it was so excite- I was like, oh, they're, they're buying it, they're buying it. You know? Later we found out that it was like a Japanese publisher who came in and bought it for samples for their business. Later, after New York, we went to LA and we use those same tactics. We did mall tours. We were starting to prepare for how we were going to do a national launch. It's tough 'cause we were a pretty lean team. And at the time a guy named Don Kingsborough had launched a company called Worlds of Wonder with Teddy Ruxpin was their big product line. And he was someone that we knew from the business. And Mr. Arakawa really liked him. And he and Ron Judy talked to Don about, maybe there was a way that we could use their distribution process to get our products into stores nationwide. At the time, there were a lot of regional chains as opposed to national chains that we have now, like Target or Walmart, that kind of thing. We decided to use their rep firm. And we went to a meeting, I believe it was before a CES. And we went to this meeting to introduce them to the product and show them what it was like. And I know I was demoing the product and that they were gonna have this big opportunity to add this Nintendo line along with Teddy Ruxpin to take out to retailers. And many of them had also already been through the fall of the video game industry and how challenging it was when all the accounts want to return the product or deal with markdowns, et cetera, they were not enthusiastic. And they were actually downright disrespectful during the meeting. And so Don [indistinct], he got up and he essentially yelled at them about their disrespect. This whole sales team of like 50 people in this room are basically saying, [laughing] we don't want to sell your product. But they went on to, of course, have great success. And many of them stayed with Nintendo after Worlds of Wonder wasn't really in business anymore. Or the Teddy Ruxpin fad was over. They continued to have a good business with Nintendo for many years. Since my job was marketing communications, doing things like advertising, PR, trying to get stories, that was very difficult. Trying to get stories about Nintendo. We even did an event in LA where we had a whole bunch of kids celebrities come, like at the time Jason Bateman was a kid celebrity and his sister. And we had all these people, Wil Wheaton from "Stand By Me" at the time. And even with that type of what we considered kid starpower, we had a hard time getting pickup on public relations, getting people to talk about it. As we launched nationally, it became something where you would see it in your personal life. I think you feel the success when, as a regular consumer, you walk into a store and you really see your work right there. It's on the screen. It just legitimizes it so much. And it made me feel like not only were we successful, but it was gonna be a big thing and that it was gonna be around a long time. So once we launched nationally with the NES, the company was really growing and started changing. The marketing department went from two or three people to dividing into different departments and having many more layers, people with more experience. We ended up forming our publishing division and I got asked to move and start "Nintendo Power Magazine," which was an outgrowth of the Fun Club Newsletter. We decided to make a full fledged magazine. But there were other things that changed also. At the senior level, Ron Judy left and went to start Nintendo in Europe. And Peter Main came on board. He was a seasoned marketer that Mr. Arakawa knew from Canada. Bob Thompson, that I mentioned, our customer service department, became huge. And we founded Game Counseling, Customer Service. And we had hundreds of people in that area. Areas like licensing. When we started licensing other companies to make software, that area was incredibly important to Nintendo. And to support that we had have a huge testing group that would test all the games and make sure the content met Nintendo's criteria, and made sure that the programs themselves didn't have any bugs or any glitches in them. So that became a huge group of people. So, really during the mid and late '80s, the company really grew. Maybe it just started looking a lot more like a lot of other companies, but definitely it grew by leaps and bounds at that time. So along with all of the pack ins, at some point we shifted to offering a newsletter and it grew so quickly, people wanting to get this newsletter, that by the time we had the issue called the "Punch-Out!!" issue, we had about 600,000 subscribers. So it was eating up a lot of marketing budget to mail out this newsletter, create it, print it, mail it. And Mr. Arakawa had seen that in Japan, publishing about video games had grown and become its own kind of category. And he wanted to do that in the US too. So he asked me if I would consider taking on this publishing world as a director of publications. Then we started "Nintendo Power" working with a co-publisher in Japan who really understood how to take things like screenshots and make all those cool maps to show people how to play the games. That was a really fun role for me. "Nintendo Power" continued for, I think, almost 25 years. So with "Nintendo Power," one of the big purposes was to make sure, again, that people liked the games, make sure that they were satisfied and they would always be ready to buy the next game, felt it was worth their money. So we would show a walk through of the whole game in "Nintendo Power" or a Player's Guide. But there was one policy which was, you don't show the final boss or the final scene. And the reason is, and I think I recall that Mr. Miyamoto was a big driver of this was that's the payoff for all your hard work. You spent all this investment of playing this game and getting to the end. And to not let the consumer and the player really enjoy the success of that final moment, it was felt like, let's just keep that for them. So when I think of the influenced Nintendo had on people, probably the area that I am most proud of is when you think of "Nintendo Power" and the millions of readers of "Nintendo Power," the idea that we were actually getting kids to read and getting them to study these things like these maps and the detail, and to take something that they loved as much as playing the game and then want to really learn about it. So just think how much you have to learn when you're playing a game and how much people enjoyed reading and poring over these things. I think it created a mindset amongst those people who were involved at that time as players, as kids that was hopefully really valuable and their whole life to think if they wanted to know about something, they would go read about it, or study about it. And that they knew that they could expand their knowledge through additional information and learning. So I think that that's the coolest contribution from my side.