Evan Ratliff

It did not happen in Japan.

In 1983, they were just like, I don't know what you're talking about because we have –

Arcades over here that are flourishing.

Now You Know the History of G.I.

Joe and Knowing It is Half the Battle from smithsonian.com.

We invented Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr.

It's still a lot of fun to play.

Written by Jimmy Stamp.

Those games are still fun to play.

What was that his name?

The Stamper?

Yeah, for sure.

The Stampster.

And in 1980, this was a few years before the United States crash, they said, hey, you know what?

So I didn't realize this but you can't copyright a figure, like a human figure.

There's this gaming thing going on, home gaming going on.

in america and maybe we should get together a team over here to just sort of poke around because we're nintendo we make a lot of toys and we have for a long time and we're big in the arcade world but we don't have a really a console system going right and that led to uh a beat i think actually there was a console called the epoch cassette vision in 1981 and it was sort of the biggest thing in japan at the time but well i think it was kind of the only thing in japan at the time too

So that was sort of an issue when people started to do knockoffs of G.I.

Joe.

but apparently early on in the process, G.I.