Drifting around urban Japan in his 1983 film Sans Soleil, Chris Marker paused to contemplate the video game Pac-Man, manufactured by the Japanese company Namco, then ubiquitous in arcades. ‘Video games’, he tells us, ‘are the first stage in a plan for machines to help the human race, the only plan that offers a future for intelligence’. But for the time being, as capitalism stands unthreatened, ‘the philosophy of our time is contained in Pac-Man’. Marker concludes that this tiny abstracted mouth, constantly chased by hungry ghosts which he can chase in turn but only for seconds at a time, ‘is the most perfect graphic metaphor of man’s fate. He puts into true perspective the balance of power between the individual and the environment.’ Death is inevitable; everyone is out to get you; triumph over your enemies is fleeting but sweet while it lasts.

Four decades on, the notion that video games can help the human race might appear to be at a low ebb. Despite the enormous scale of the industry – which generates between $200 and 300 billion a year – video games are still widely assumed, not always inaccurately, to be a form largely calibrated to the tastes, libidos and impulses of the sort of angrily entitled adolescent males that today are often referred to as ‘incels’; throughout the 2010s, there was a close affinity between online gaming circles and the American alt-right. The Guardian’s video game critic Keza MacDonald eschews this heated discourse in Super Nintendo, a new history of the video games corporation which, she argues, has embarked upon something close to what Marker imagined: the creation of an artificial space which favours a gently surreal form of often collective play, in which machismo and fantasies of power have very little place. Rather than lamenting the awfulness of the gaming world, she concentrates on how Nintendo offers an actually existing alternative. Her book is a love letter to a tech corporation – something highly unexpected in 2026. Even more unexpected is that it is, in part, convincing.

Nintendo might at first seem a strange candidate to invoke in making the case for the utopian potential of the mass market video game. It was founded in the 19^th century in Kyoto by the Yamauchi family as a manufacturer of card games, before moving into electronics during the 70s. It first came to prominence outside Japan at the end of the American ‘video game crash’ in the mid-1980s. Although Japanese games like Pac-Man (1980) and Nintendo’s Donkey Kong (1981) dominated the arcades, American corporations – Commodore and, especially, Atari – had monopolized home gaming. They had also produced vast quantities of what today would be called ‘slop’ – games based on successful IPs like the film ET (1982), housed in flashy boxes with paintings and film stills but which were awful to play. Notoriously, thousands of copies of the ET game for the Atari 2600 were buried in the desert at the height of the crash in 1983.

A couple of years later, Nintendo released its Famicom (‘Family Computer’) in the US, where it was sold as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), a low-tech offering which became hugely successful thanks to the quality of the system’s games, whose technological limitations were actually emphasized by the marketing. Each game cartridge would feature a zoomed-in screenshot of the blocky, pixellated action: what you see is what you get. American video game manufacturers like Atari never recovered, and American consoles didn’t become competitive with those made in Japan until Microsoft’s Xbox decades later. It is hard not to be reminded of this episode as the likes of OpenAI and Tesla, today’s equivalents of a Commodore or an Atari with their charismatic founders, aggressive corporate culture and interest in the most advanced and macho technology, have found themselves undercut by cheaper, nimbler, less unpleasant East Asian competitors – although now it’s Chinese ventures like DeepSeek or BYD that are humiliating American companies.

Perhaps because video game history has so often been written from a North American perspective, Nintendo has often been portrayed as the villain. From David Sheff’s Game Over: How Nintendo Zapped an American Industry, Captured Your Dollars and Enslaved Your Children (1993) to Dominic Arsenault’s Super Power, Spoony Bard, and Silverware: The Super Nintendo Entertainment System (2017), accounts tend to emphasize the company’s backwardness and conservatism. Nintendo has usually been considered an insular, secretive company. Its sharp practices were once notorious: ruthless dealings with competitors; a policy that effectively forced third-party developers to pay for the privilege of designing games for Nintendo’s consoles; a family values policy that sanitized even the most gentle games; and proprietary software that made any tinkering or DIY programming all but impossible.

This scepticism has also been echoed in some of the few left histories of video games. The console, which Nintendo turned from a potential cul-de-sac into a staple in millions of homes, gradually supplanted what had been a more open and democratic ecosystem of computer games, particularly in Britain and continental Europe. With British-designed and manufactured systems like the ZX Spectrum or the BBC Micro, the line between programmer and player, owner and user, was often blurred; copyright was loose if it pertained at all. In Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers and Class Struggle (2019), Jamie Woodcock described the console – a computer that can essentially do nothing other than play pre-purchased, copyrighted games – as an enclosure of the computer game commons. Each of the consoles Nintendo has made since the early 1980s, from the Famicom through to the Game Boy, the Super Nintendo, the N64, the DS, the Wii and the Switch, locks its users into the company’s hardware and software. Nintendo did this decades before the use of proprietary apps did the same thing to the internet.

I find this writing politically compelling as far as it goes, but as someone who has always enjoyed video games though has never learned to programme (at least beyond making an Amstrad CPC 464 computer repeat swearwords down the screen at the age of 11), it explains little about why one would engage with this peculiar technological genre in the first place. MacDonald’s book is unlike any of the other serious histories of video games I’ve read in this regard. She emphasizes that Nintendo’s success, which has outlasted nearly all its contemporaries of the 1980s and 1990s, owes little to conventional advantages like greater speed or firepower, graphical fidelity or technological superiority, but to their games being consistently more enjoyable to play, for a greater number of people. This is highly deliberate – Nintendo’s programmers, MacDonald finds, quote freely from Huizinga’s Homo Ludens – and a constant in their five decades of video game production. The reason she was driven to tell this story now is the contrast Nintendo appears to provide with our Californian tech overlords: ‘where other game publishers have started darkly manipulating the form with exploitative microtransactions or dark-pattern “engagement techniques” borrowed from the gambling industry . . . Nintendo has remained resolutely and refreshingly un-corporate about the business of fun. Delight comes first, profit second’.

That’s as may be – though Nintendo has always cared a great deal about profit. Hiroshi Yamauchi, the CEO who turned it from a card company into an electronics behemoth, was, at least at first, a brutal employer. When he took over the firm, he suppressed a strike at the Nintendo factory by firing the entire staff. He then reconstituted the company with engineers and designers, nurtured over decades. These included toy designer and engineer Gunpei Yokoi, a fascinating character whose inventions before the Game Boy included the ‘Love Tester’ (a game which claimed to test romantic compatibility by measuring the heat of a couple’s entwined hands) and the ‘Ultra Hand’ (an elaborate grappler); and the game designer and programmer Shigeru Miyamoto, responsible for most of the company’s early hits, notably the Super Mario and Zelda franchises, and still at the company today. Yamauchi had a long-term plan for dominating the video games market – the Famicom/NES was created by engineers who had spent two years carefully studying all rival machines, working out how to do what they did more cheaply and pleasurably, and crucially, how to make their machine and its games almost impossible to copy.

MacDonald writes beautifully about the joys of these games – particularly the ongoing Mario and Zelda series, alongside deeper cuts like Metroid and Animal Crossing, and the initially child-oriented likes of Pokémon (which is in monetary terms, she notes, the most successful franchise in history, more than anything produced by Disney, Lucas or Marvel). These games combine instant accessibility with an abundance of secrets, hidden pathways and alternative worlds, such as the Dark World of Zelda – A Link to the Past (1991), a mirror-image space of evil and foreboding inspired by the films of David Lynch. Gunpei Yokoi summarized Nintendo’s philosophy as ‘lateral thinking with withered technology’; limits have always been important. The character Yoshi, introduced in Super Mario World (1990), is a dinosaur, not because the designers had intended to design a dinosaur, but because the space on the screen into which they had managed to cram a new ‘sprite’ happened to be ‘dinosaur-shaped’. Later, Nintendo’s interest in haptic experiment – the one-hand remote control of the Wii, with peripherals including an electronic exercise mat, the stylus-controlled DS, or the cardboard pianos of Nintendo Labo (2018) – brought this element of surprise into the technology itself.

Nintendo’s strategies for expansion help explain why the company often comes across as relatively benign – especially since the late 1990s, when increasingly lifelike video games began their descent into violent, militaristic genres (the Call of Duty series has been used as a recruiting and training tool by the US army). Nintendo has always wanted its games to be playable by people who aren’t adolescent boys or young men. The middle-aged and elderly, women and girls, have been incessantly targeted since the Wii and DS consoles were launched in the mid-2000s. Only in recent years have women made up a significant part of Nintendo’s staff, but they have come to prominence in both the programming and playing of games like the Animal Crossing series, a non-adversarial, surrealist game in which nothing much happens beyond wandering around, interacting with various creatures and embarking on whimsical tasks. Its aimlessness and openness draw on something which has been there since the first Zelda games, which were intended to simulate the experience of going on a long, drifting walk – something which can now be done with millions of other players through online gaming.

MacDonald knows all this is on some level a sales tactic – a way of making the product more attractive to more people – but she nonetheless makes the case for Nintendo as a holdout of post-war Japanese managed capitalism, with its long-term planning, lifelong employment practices, staff benefits and lack of interest in shareholder value: a remnant of the 70s which has endured despite the incremental neoliberal reforms of Prime Ministers from Nakasone to Abe. ‘Nintendo’, she writes, ‘holds on to its staff for decades, a nearly unprecedented situation for creatives in the highly unstable games industry, where studios expand and contract their teams with mass hiring and firing for every new project’. MacDonald fully subscribes to the cult of the deadpan programmer Satoru Iwata, the first CEO of the company not from the Yamauchi family, who died in 2015. When Nintendo fell into financial trouble during a fallow period between the Wii and the Switch – one of several occasions when its demise has been predicted – Iwata halved his salary and curbed payouts to the board of directors, rather than making any layoffs, a striking repudiation of Yamauchi’s growth-through-mass-sacking approach. Nintendo has immense cash reserves, largely accumulated during its long dominance of the American video games industry, which made it for a time one of the most profitable companies in the world.

In some ways, however, Super Nintendo is a bleak book. Nintendo games are frequently presented as a respite and a salve, an escapist refuge of sociality and play in an era of nihilism and paranoia. The examples MacDonald stresses are Pokémon Go (2016), which encouraged its users to ‘find’ Pokémon creatures in the real towns and cities where they lived, spurring them to explore the built environment, and Animal Crossing – New Horizons (2020), which became famous during the pandemic lockdowns, as vast numbers of people staved off depression by tinkering around in its artificial environments. The freedom the game offered meant not only that it became a ‘safe space’ in a time of mass fear, but also that all sorts of political expression – from BLM demos to protests in Hong Kong – could take place within the game’s spaces while the outside world was off-limits. Moreover, the games are, MacDonald argues, an alternative to the destructive attention-patterns fostered by social media. Games like these are played consciously and are not something you do while doing something else.

Animal Crossing’s millions of players, MacDonald concludes, appear to ‘yearn for a simple life where your only responsibilities are taking walks on the beach, tending a garden, making things and being in community’. In the game one can hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening and criticize after dinner, but only in an electronic walled garden. That brings us back to Marker’s vision for the video game as an enclosed artificial world in which machines present us with alternative futures and better ways of being. I was reminded of Marker’s ideas about the world of Pac-Man last Christmas, when I hosted my six-year-old niece. She noted the pile of old consoles in the corner of my living room, and played a few, with growing impatience. She was wholly unimpressed by the various shoot-em-ups, beat-em-ups and platform games in which you have to leap across great distances and stomp on enemies; equally so by Pac-Man itself, which I eagerly presented for her approval. ‘Don’t you have any games where I don’t have to kill anything, and nothing can kill me? You know, like Animal Crossing?’

Read on: Rob Lucas, ‘Dreaming in Code’, NLR 62.