Evan Ratliff

He designed the game very famously.

He obviously became a legend overnight because of it.

And so what happens when you do this in America?

They were also smart enough to do some really savvy marketing moves, which kind of rolled out in a few different ways.

The private sector said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

I want to be able to sell as much sugary garbage to kids as I want.

Well, they had a lot of advertising money.

That was sort of a given.

They had about $20 million to spend off of that, which is a ton of money for advertising now and then.

You can't restrict free trade in business.

And so we're going to raise a record at the time, $16 million to lobby against this.

But they created a call center.

They trained these players and these gamers basically to master these games and sit on the phone.

Well, and they were helped out in no small part by getting the right guy into the White House.

And you could call a number if you got stuck and talk to a human being that could like walk you through a level that you couldn't get through.

Right, so in 1980, one of the first things Ronald Reagan did was he appointed a new chairman of the Federal Trade Commission.

They had Nintendo Power Magazine, which is a very big deal.

And this was a move that basically said, you know what, there's gonna be no regulation whatsoever.

And they created the first, you know, gaming championships where, and these are still just huge, you know, where kids and adults alike, you know, now adults from all over the world come together to battle each other out.

Gotta leave these markets free.