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Captain Nintendo
Oct. 7th, 2006 05:54 amFound this a few hours ago via Destructoid, and just read through the whole damn thing in one sitting. It is the fascinating story of the former Nintendo employee who created the original Captain Nintendo, better known to most people as Captain N: The Game Master.
The origin story for Captain Nintendo, glorified Mary Sue fan fiction though it may have been, is far cooler than the "sucked through a TV" story for Captain N that was shown in the cartoon. Assuming, of course, that this guy is actually telling the truth and isn't just pulling this story completely out of his ass, then he got royally screwed over on this whole Captain N thing by Nintendo (or, at the least, by that asshole in the marketing department).
However, that's only a small part of the overall story, which is a 9 chapter behemoth but well worth the read. It chronicles this man's ups and downs in the video game industry. It includes a history of the early days of Nintendo of America and some insight into the creation of Nintendo Power magazine. It includes a chapter about how he got to attend the premiere of the 1989 Batman movie and what he experienced there. It includes a chapter about a young cancer patient and this man's struggle to allow that boy to play Super Mario Bros. 2 a few months before it was released. And, in the last two chapters, it chronicles his experiences after leaving Nintendo.
As a DigiPen student, I would highly recommend to my fellow DigiPen students that they read, at the very least, those last two chapters.
Reading about all the letters that Nintendo received from kids while this guy was there brought back some memories. It's kind of embarrassing to admit it now, but I too wrote a few rather hokey letters to Nintendo back in the day. At least none of mine were in crayon, though. On the other hand, it was in one of the responses to those letters that I first heard about EarthBound, which I'll freely admit was a contributing factor to me buying that game later when it was released.
The origin story for Captain Nintendo, glorified Mary Sue fan fiction though it may have been, is far cooler than the "sucked through a TV" story for Captain N that was shown in the cartoon. Assuming, of course, that this guy is actually telling the truth and isn't just pulling this story completely out of his ass, then he got royally screwed over on this whole Captain N thing by Nintendo (or, at the least, by that asshole in the marketing department).
However, that's only a small part of the overall story, which is a 9 chapter behemoth but well worth the read. It chronicles this man's ups and downs in the video game industry. It includes a history of the early days of Nintendo of America and some insight into the creation of Nintendo Power magazine. It includes a chapter about how he got to attend the premiere of the 1989 Batman movie and what he experienced there. It includes a chapter about a young cancer patient and this man's struggle to allow that boy to play Super Mario Bros. 2 a few months before it was released. And, in the last two chapters, it chronicles his experiences after leaving Nintendo.
As a DigiPen student, I would highly recommend to my fellow DigiPen students that they read, at the very least, those last two chapters.
Reading about all the letters that Nintendo received from kids while this guy was there brought back some memories. It's kind of embarrassing to admit it now, but I too wrote a few rather hokey letters to Nintendo back in the day. At least none of mine were in crayon, though. On the other hand, it was in one of the responses to those letters that I first heard about EarthBound, which I'll freely admit was a contributing factor to me buying that game later when it was released.
