Nintendo Leader Risked Career

Without one man's willingness to face repeated rejection, Nintendo would have remained an obscure maker of arcade games and the Mariners would still be looking for a buyer.

The credit for Nintendo's success in America largely goes to Minoru Arakawa, who risked his career in what seemed a doomed attempt to revive a collapsed video-game market.

Arakawa runs Nintendo of America, the North American arm of the Nintendo Co. Ltd. of Kyoto, Japan. Nintendo, which dominates the world's market for video games, predicts U.S. sales this year of $4.8 billion.

Arakawa, 45, is chairman of the Baseball Club of Seattle, a group that has offered $100 million to buy the Mariners from owner Jeff Smulyan. The lead investor is Hiroshi Yamauchi, president of Nintendo Co. Ltd. and Arakawa's father-in-law. Yamauchi would hold a 60 percent interest in the team, with his interest controlled by Arakawa, with the remainder split among four Seattle businessmen.

Arakawa is well-known as a competitive presence in the world of consumer electronics, but in many respects he is like Yamauchi. The two shun the limelight and seldom join business clubs.

But there are important differences. Unlike Yamauchi, Arakawa speaks English, a reflection of his advanced education, both here and in Japan. He is a graduate of the University of Tokyo and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is not a U.S. citizen.

In rare interviews, Arakawa comes across as somewhat shy, gracious, quick to smile or laugh, and charming. Unlike Yamauchi, Arakawa will talk about himself, often as the butt of jokes.

Outside business, Arakawa's passion is golf. He and his wife, Yoko, have two children, live in Medina and belong to an Eastside country club. He has been a resident of the Seattle area for 12 years. Before joining Nintendo, he was an executive with Marc-narod, a Canadian construction company based in Vancouver, B.C.

Arakawa did not respond yesterday to a request for an interview.

"I don't think you're going to get an interview with either of them," said Bill White, Nintendo's director of advertising and publicity, referring to Arakawa and Yamauchi.

White said he doesn't know if Arakawa has ever gone to a Mariners game. Arakawa's motivation for helping buy the team is to keep baseball in Seattle, he said.

In a 1990 interview, Arakawa told how he brought Nintendo's video machine to America.

In 1983, Nintendo introduced in Japan a game machine called Family Computer. It was a huge hit. But in America, the video-game market disappeared following the collapse of Atari Inc., the industry leader whose machines played "Asteroids" and "Space Invaders."

At the time, Nintendo had a small operation in Seattle, where it located to be close to the port. Nintendo manufactured coin-operated arcade games, particularly the hit game, "Donkey Kong." According to Arakawa, only two people at Nintendo thought the Family Computer would sell in America, himself and Yamauchi.

Backed by Yamauchi, Arakawa went knocking on doors, trying to show the renamed Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) to buyers for retail chains. The reaction was not encouraging.

"Do you know why I have this job?" the buyers would say as they sent Arakawa away. "Because the person before me was fired because he bought video games."

But Arakawa had company cash to keep going.

In those early years, Nintendo's U.S. revenue from arcade games, one quarter at a time, grew to $30 million to $40 million a year. By anyone's measure, that's big money. But not the kind of money Arakawa saw in the American home-entertainment market. He saw billions, not millions. Still, the retailers, the necessary conduit to the public, refused to help.

Arakawa and other company executives moved to New York City, guaranteed to retailers that the NES would sell, visited shopping centers to personally appeal to parents and spent $50 million on test marketing there. Nintendo flooded the television market with advertisements featuring NES packaged with a Zapper gun and "Rob the Robot," a gimmick that Arakawa figured would distinguish NES from previous video machines. Rob was a flop, but it did get people to buy the NES.

It was brilliant, said Peter Main, Nintendo's vice president for marketing and himself a legend. Adweek Magazine selected Main as Marketer of the Year 1989. Main calls Rob "probably the biggest marketing success of all time." Good thing, too. Arakawa says a failure could have ended his career with Nintendo.

To keep growing, Arakawa offered a simple philosophy: "Our future depends on technology and also the entertainment, what we can provide for the consumer to be satisfied."

Home entertainment will remain Nintendo's focus, but once sales slow the company will look for ways to diversify, he says. And yes, someday there could be a Mario theme park. Disney is a company that Arakawa admires. Of course, a decision like that would have to be made by Mr. Yamauchi, he said.

"Sometimes, he's called the dictator," Arakawa said, explaining that often Yamauchi pushes one belief while market studies and experts push another, only to prove Yamauchi right. "He's very experienced in knowing what will happen in the future."

Looking back, Arakawa smiles at the image of himself trying to convince people that Nintendo would succeed. The toughest to convince were Nintendo's competitors in the arcade business, who told him he was crazy.

"Those people," said Arakawa, "are now making software for NES."