Winning Is the Only Thing

By CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

TITLE: GAME OVER

AUTHOR: DAVID SHEFF

PUBLISHER: RANDOM HOUSE; 445 PAGES; $25

THE BOTTOM LINE: An engaging book explains how Nintendo made millions stealing children's brains.

Baseball isn't America's pastime. Nintendo is America's pastime. Baseball is full of management lockouts, under-.500 expansion clubs, and superstar cads who actually sell their autographs. To many, it has lost its power to truly spellbind and has become just another disenchanted thing in a world with a depressing deficit of magic. But watch a child playing Nintendo. See the way it ensnares the attention, engages the imagination. It's the modern, rough equivalent of how a youngster might have felt watching Hank Aaron hit one into the cheap seats.

Then again, maybe it's the electronic equivalent of a crackhead lighting up in a Denny's rest room. JUNIOR AN ADDICT? a USA Today story on video games once asked. Talk-show host Oprah Winfrey dubbed such kids "Nintendo zombies." The threat is clear: Nintendo may be enchanting too well.

Game Over: How Nintendo Zapped an American Industry, Captured Your Dollars, and Enslaved Your Children is that rarest of books: it actually explores everything after that obligatory colon in the title. The book, which is almost never dull, tracks the growth of Nintendo from a Japanese playing-card company founded in 1889 to an international video-game behemoth that by 1992 consistently earned after-tax profits of more than $500 million a year. That's more than all U.S. movie studios combined and more than IBM, Apple or Microsoft.

The name Nintendo means "leave luck to heaven," but Sheff shows that the company's leaders have made their own luck, through hard work and foresight, while fighting off rival gamemakers such as Sega. When MCA Universal charged that the game Donkey Kong infringed on the copyright to the movie King Kong, Nintendo stubbornly refused to settle, and eventually MCA had to pay Nintendo a $1.8 million penalty. Nintendo chief Hiroshi Yamauchi also wisely built expansion capabilities in his entertainment systems, allowing an innocuous video-game system to perhaps become the home-communications network of the future. Writes Sheff: "Nintendo's success was proof of the superiority of a system that allows long-term commitment."

Sheff mixes interesting personal details with colorful snippets of writing. The Japanese wife of the head of Nintendo of America learns English by watching TV and "developed an accent decidedly reminiscent of Peter Falk's Columbo." Her husband has an odd habit of falling asleep in strange places -- including on a fairway during a major golf tournament as Jack Nicklaus and Lee Trevino teed off. And the book claims Dustin Hoffman wanted to play the computer character Mario in the movie adaptation because his kids loved the game (the movie is currently in theaters with Bob Hoskins in the lead role).

"The games of a people reveal a great deal about them," Marshall McLuhan is quoted as saying at the beginning of this book. At the end of Game Over, the head of Nintendo leads a successful effort to purchase the Seattle Mariners baseball team. It's symbolic in a bittersweet way; the game of the present has absorbed the game of the past.