← Skip Montreux – Down to Business English
Skip Montreux – Down to Business English
The Nintendo Story & Pokemon Go | 91
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Hi everyone, Skip Montreux here. Thank you for downloading D2B today here at down to Business English. Our goal is to produce self study learning content that is both stimulating and relevant for your language studies. This is why we choose business news topics that are making headlines around the world. It is our hope that by using this original content you will be able to develop your listening comprehension skills and and expand the range of professional words and phrases that you can use in your business Life. All of D2B's content is available for no charge. Both the episodes and the audio scripts are now and always will be 100% free. But today I need to ask you for your support. If you find down to Business English useful in your language studies, why don't you consider becoming a D2B member? What do you get with a D2B membership? First, your membership will help us bring you even more episodes on a more regular basis. Second, as a member you will have access to the D2B audioscript library where you can download our entire catalog of audio scripts from one convenient location. No longer will you need to fill in and submit a registration form each time you want to download an audioscript. Third, as a member, you will have the option of having audio scripts of newly released D2B episodes emailed directly to you, saving you the hassle of logging into your account. To become a D2B member, simply visit our website at downtobusinessenglish.com and click on the D2B membership link at the top of the page. On behalf of myself, Des and Samantha, we thank you for your support from
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Tokyo, Japan and Auckland, New Zealand. This is down to Business English with your hosts, Git Montreux and Samantha Vega.
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Hello Samantha, how are you today?
- [02:15]
C
Doing really well, enjoying the winter here in New Plymouth. We just moved recently to our new digs and enjoying it a lot. It's a beautiful sunny day. How about you? How have you been doing, Skip?
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I have been doing very well Recently I had an old friend from high school come over to Japan. She brought her family over here and I got to meet her older children and they were very interesting kids and I had a lot of fun hanging out with them. They were really knowledgeable about Japanese culture and anime and manga and they were a lot of fun to spend time with. One thing that what was really exciting or that they were very excited about was playing this new Pokemon Go game in Tokyo which is the birthplace of Pokemon and that whole universe and it really got me thinking about 1980s and Pokemon and Nintendo and that's what I wanted to talk about on today's show. The history of Nintendo and the birth of Pokemon.
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Ah, interesting. It must be great playing, playing Pokemon Go, actually, in the birthplace of Pokemon.
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It's a lot of fun, to tell you the truth.
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Well, let's do it. Let's get D2B down to business with Nintendo and Pokemon Go. So, Skip, can you tell us, so how did Nintendo get started anyway?
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Actually, Nintendo was founded in Kyoto in 1889 by Fusajiro Yamauchi.
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C
1889? Don't you mean 1989?
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No, I mean 1889. It is a very, very old company. And originally it was a playing card company. And they didn't really start its evolution into what we now recognize as Nintendo until the mid-1950s.
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C
Oh, that's interesting. So why did they move away from playing cards?
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A
It's an interesting little story. In the mid-50s, Hiroshi Yamauchi, who was the grandson of the founder, he paid a visit to the United States. And while he was there, he visited the largest playing card company in the world at that time, which had the name of the US Playing Card Company. And he was just so surprised to see this large company operating in a very, very tiny office. And he realized the playing card industry had very limited potential.
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C
Limited potential. It kind of seems like a bit of a mistake. Playing cards have been around forever, I suppose. Not necessarily so lucrative, but stable. Anyway, so from there the company started, decided to branch out.
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Yes. And they went through a whole gamut of companies, everything from taxi companies to love hotels. And finally, in the 1960s, they started settling in on the Japanese toy market.
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Ah, okay. So that's the 60s. That's a little bit before video games then. So what were some of the early toys?
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Their biggest hit was this toy called Ultra Hand.
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C
Ultra Hand? Ultra Hand.
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Yes. It's this kind of a lazy tong apparatus that you can use like scissors and grab things.
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Oh, oh, like the grabbers at the train stations that train station masters have to pick up stuff on the train tracks?
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Yeah, exactly like that. A little smaller, but the same concept. Now, that toy was designed by a Nintendo employee by the name of Gunpei Yokoi. And actually he wasn't a game developer. He was just a maintenance engineer in one of Nintendo's factories. And the story goes that the President Yamauchi was visiting the factory one day and he saw this little apparatus that Gunpei had designed. And he immediately said, put that into production. And they put into production, and it was a huge success. And Gunpei Yokoi was transferred to the game development section. Wow.
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C
Oh, that's a nice story. So out of the boring factory into the excitement of research and development.
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Yes, and he stayed in there and helped develop toys. And when Nintendo decided to move into the video game market in the early 1970s, he became one of their very first video game designers.
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Okay, so this is 74 or so around the time home computing was taking off. So Apple Computers started around the same time too.
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That's right. It's a very new market, and Yokoi was involved in the early games. One person that he hired was this young man by the name of Shigeru Miyamoto. And it was Miyamoto, under Yokoi's mentorship, who designed some of the most famous video games in history. The first one being Donkey Kong. Do you remember that?
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Oh, yes, of course.
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It was a huge hit in 1981, and it led to the Super Mario Brothers and Zelda. And Nintendo just had a whole string of successful arcade games.
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I remember Galaga, or Galaga, depending on how you wanted to pronounce it. The table versions of Galaga and Centipede. Centipede. How about Centipede? Ah, somewhat of a wasted youth, I suppose.
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Yeah, I remember those days fondly, too. But you probably remember as well the video arcade centers disappearing, and that was because of the development of electronic technology. Many game makers gravitated towards making home consoles. Now, Yokoi and Miyamoto, they became fascinated with developing handheld video games. And that was sparked by business trip Yokoi was on. Once he was traveling on a Shinkansen, and he noticed many salarymen sitting on the train playing with their calculator just to pass the time. And he thought, wow, we should have video games in some kind of handheld device.
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Wow. Passing the time playing, playing on a calculator. Hey, hey, I can spell hello and boobs on a calculator, but that's about it.
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Well, fortunately, they had a little bit more imagination than that. And the result of pursuing handheld games was releasing the Nintendo game boy in 1989. And it was a huge hit for Nintendo. It lasted for about 14 years, and in that time they sold almost 120 million units worldwide.
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Wow.
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And one reason it was so successful is that the Game Boy used software cartridges that let you play different games on the same device. Something that maybe we think is commonplace today, but at that time was quite technically novel.
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I remember Sonic the Hedgehog from Sega at that time, too. That was the beginning of Tetris as well. Wasn't this handheld market very competitive?
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Yes, it was extremely competitive and Nintendo was always looking for new game concepts. They mentored a lot of game designers in Japan. One of those designers was Satoshi Taijiri. And it was he who came up with the concept of the Pokemon Universe, which was a role play game. And it was originally designed specifically for the Game Boy. In fact, it was one of the very first video games that was designed for multi users.
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Oh yeah, that's interesting. So Pokemon wouldn't exist if it wasn't for Game Boy.
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That's right. Now, after Game Boy introduced Pokemon to the world, the franchise exploded into comic books, TV shows, movies, card games, and of course toy merchandising.
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So is that also the same time that Pikachu came out?
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Yeah, I think Pikachu was involved in that whole universe right from the beginning. Now, managing this Pokemon franchise became a very overwhelming task. That the Pokemon company was established and that company solely focused on merchandising and licensing the Pokemon Universe. And that company was managed by another person by the name of Tsunekazu Ishihara.
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Ah. So let the console game wars begin.
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And it was a huge war between Nintendo, Sega, Sony PlayStation. They were really battling to keep market share, but Nintendo really survived. A lot of it was due to Pokemon. Now, moving forward a little bit, in 2004, the President Yamiuchi san, he resigned. He had been president since 1949 and he relinquished control of the company and a man by the name of Satoru Iwata took over as president. Interesting. He was the very first president to not be related to the founder of Nintendo. And Iwata was very comparable to Steve Jobs. He was very much of a visionary. And he introduced the Nintendo DS series and the Nintendo Wii series, which really helped secure Nintendo's business model.
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Yeah. So things were good for Nintendo in the 2000s.
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Pretty good, yes. But the Wii U bombed, I believe that was around 2010 and Nintendo was suffering severely and they were losing again to Sony and the new player on the block, Microsoft Xbox.
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And it was a big player on the bl. It seemed at this time that the developers were playing their own game behind the scenes a little bit. Game developing competition was more competitive than the games themselves, perhaps. So Iwata Sanhe Nintendo designers develop Pokemon Go?
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Not exactly. Now, Ishihara san, the president of the Pokemon Go company, he happened to be a very big fan of this geolocation based game called Ingress. And Ingress was produced by a company out of the United States by the name of Niantec. And Niantec was a spin off of Google. It's quite a complicated web of business relationships. Now, Pokemon Go uses a lot of the geolocation data that was developed by the Ingress game. And Iwata from Nintendo was a huge supporter of the development of Pokemon Go. He thought that using mobile games would attract customers to Nintendo and they would eventually buy Nintendo hardware. So he was very enthusiastic about releasing Pokemon Go and he helped work on the concept right up until his very untimely death in July of 2015. Unfortunately, he did not live long enough to see the release of Pokemon Go in April of this year.
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Oh, that's quite sad actually. But I'll tell you what, it was a smashing success. I see Nintendo stock prices going through the roof.
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Yes, they did go through the roof and came down a little bit. So it might be a little bit too early to tell how this will impact the sale of their hardware. Many analysts are worried that these mobile games will cannibalize the video game hardware. But you're right, so far so good.
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Well, time will tell. Just think, Skip, when we're old and gray and old folks homes in various parts of the world, we'll be, we'll be able to team up on virtual reality and save the world from zombie apocalypse and and beyond.
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Well, if there's anyone I would want to team up with to kill zombies, it would be you, Samantha.
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Thanks. Let's get down to V now, shall we? Down to vocabulary.
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Down to business English audio scripts are a great learning tool. Be sure to visit the D2B website and download your free audio script of today's podcast. Down to businessenglish.com that's www.downtobusinessenglish.com.
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Let's start off with the adjective lucrative. This word is used to communicate that something makes or produces a lot of money or is very profitable. In the story, I commented that playing cards, Nintendo's original product, although perhaps not the most lucrative product, that they were at least a stable source of revenue.
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In other words, even though playing cards were not a big money maker, at least they were a steady source of sales.
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That's right. Playing cards have been around forever and people will always buy them. Skip, can you give us an example of lucrative in a business context?
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Sure. I am currently conducting a course on global negotiations. I won't mention my client's name, but they are very well known in their industry. In fact, 30 years ago they probably had the largest or second largest share of that market. However, their industry has become so competitive over the years and that the product they make the most money on is not as lucrative as it once was. In fact, their entire corporate strategy has now changed. They are completely focused on creating new markets with new products that currently don't exist.
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That sounds like a very expensive and long term investment.
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Absolutely. But they believe that selling a product in a market that has no or little competition will be much more lucrative and than what they are doing now.
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But risky.
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Yes.
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Let's move on to the next word, shall we?
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Next on our list is the verb branch out.
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I think this is easy enough for listeners to understand, but it is such a useful phrase that we thought it would be worth talking about.
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Branch out is synonymous with the words expand and grow in the story. Right after Samantha commented that playing cards were a stable business product, she asked me a confirmation question.
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Specifically, I asked so from there the company decided to branch out.
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In other words, Samantha was asking if the company had decided to expand into other markets besides playing cards.
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Skip, the company you work for offers corporate language training services. Has it ever thought about branching out into other areas of language education?
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That is a good question. A few years ago, we considered branching out into children's language education.
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Oh, that sounds like a lucrative market.
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That's what we thought too. In fact, we even offered a trial kids English course as an experiment. But in the end, we decided that it was not a good direction for us to branch out into.
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Why was that?
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Well, as lucrative as the market may seem, it required a lot of organizational resources, something my company was not prepared to invest in.
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Interesting.
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What's our next word, Samantha?
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Next is the noun gambit. This word comes from the game of chess. Do you like chess, Skip?
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I used to play a little in university, but honestly I haven't played in years.
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Well, you might know then that the opening move in chess is called a gambit.
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No, I didn't know that. But I do know that there is a wide variety of traditional opening moves a player can make that will give them an advantage over their opponent.
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And that is what gambit means. A gambit is something you say or an action you take that you hope will give you an advantage. In the story, Skip said that Nintendo went through a whole gambit of companies looking for a business that was more lucrative than playing cards.
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In other words, they were trying different business models in a search for something that would give them an advantage in business.
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In a business negotiation, your opening gambit is very important and needs to be considered carefully. If your opening gambit is too strong or too weak or too high or too low, it can really Damage your position.
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That is a very appropriate example. But moving on. Our next word is the phrasal verb to gravitate towards the noun. Gravity is the natural force that pulls two objects together, and it was first explained by Sir Isaac Newton way, way back in the 17th century.
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Gravity. That's a very heavy word.
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Very funny. Anyway, idiomatically, to gravitate towards something means to be invisibly pulled toward or attracted to something. In the story, I said that as electronic technology Improved in the 1980s, video game makers gravitated towards making game consoles. In other words, they were moved or pulled toward making game consoles.
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This is a nice phrase to use when you're communicating to someone that you were still in the process of making a decision. Imagine your boss asks you to make a decision related to your job. He or she asks you to make a decision by Friday. On Thursday, you run into them in the lunchroom, and they ask you if you've made a decision. You might say, I haven't made the final decision yet, but I'm gravitating toward the second choice.
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Sounds very professional. I'm thinking about buying a new laptop sometimes in the next several months. I've used Apple computers for years, but at the moment I. I'm gravitating toward purchasing a Chromebook from Google.
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Really? That's a surprising development.
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I know it would be strange not buying a Mac, but the Chromebook does almost everything I need and costs much less. Do you have the next word?
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I do. And it is the verb to relinquish. This word means to give up power, control, or responsibility for something when you don't really want to give it up. In the story, Skip reported that Hiroshi Yamauchi relinquished control of Nintendo to Satoru Iwata. In other words, he gave up control of Nintendo to Mr. Iwata. You get the sense from the statement that Mr. Yamauchi didn't want to resign, but as he was getting older, perhaps had no other choice.
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This is a very useful word. Not only can it be used to describe a person giving up their position to someone else, it can also be used to describe a stock price that loses value after making some gains.
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That's true. For example, after the release of Pokemon Go, Nintendo's stock prices quickly doubled in value. But since then, it has relinquished some of those gains and has seemed to stabilize at a lower price.
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Hopefully, it won't relinquish its value too much more.
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It is hard to say, what is our next word?
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Finally, today is another verb to cannibalize which is derived from the noun cannibalism, which is the act of eating the meat of another human.
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Yuck.
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Yes, but it was practiced by several cultures in Africa and the South Pacific.
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And how does the act of eating human flesh relate to business? Obviously, it is used idiomatically.
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Yes, when a company starts to sell a new product that damages or eats the sales of its existing product, it is known as cannibalizing. In the story I mentioned that analysts were worried that smartphone video games will cannibalize the sales of video game hardware. What this means is analysts are worried that the popularity of smartphone video games will cause people to stop buying video game hardware and sales will fall.
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Honestly, Skip, I don't think I have ever heard this word used as a verb.
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To tell the truth, it is more commonly used as a noun. But the verb is used in sales. It would not be surprising to hear it in an internal sales meeting. For example, you might the sales volume for Product X was significantly cannibalized by the launch of our new Product Y.
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Fair enough, but the imagery is not very pretty.
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Like they say, all is fair in love and sales.
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Nobody says that.
- [23:03]
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Would you like to support down to Business English? Be sure to visit the D2B page in iTunes and subscribe to this show. While you are there, why don't you leave a rating and a comment. This will help D2B reach more people wanting to improve their Business English skills. Down to Business English Business News to improve your Business English.
- [23:35]
A
Thank you Samantha. It was very nice speaking with you today.
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C
You too, Skip. Thanks for taking us through all of that interesting information about Nintendo and Pokemon Go and for the little trip down memory lane. I haven't thought about Donkey Kong and video arcades in years.
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A
That's funny. I suddenly have an urge to visit a game center this afternoon and play some vintage games.
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That might not be a bad idea as they may be empty. Everyone else in Tokyo seems to be out playing Pokemon Go, according to the news reports.
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True. Anyway, thanks for listening everyone. We will be back very soon with an all new episode of down to Business English. See you next time.
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Bye everyone. Take care.
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Have a comment or question about today's show. Don't be shy. Visit the D2B website or the Facebook page and post any comments or questions there. Skip, Des or Samantha will be sure to leave a reply. Want to get even more down to Business English? Sign up for the D2B Newsletter and receive updates on some of the stories covered on down to business English. That's www.downtobusinessenglish.com down to business English Business news to improve your business English.