How Ricoh came to develop the Nintendo NES / Famicom

Transcript of various chats with Satoru Iwata of Nintendo, published on the 25th anniversary of the first Super Mario Bros. game.

A few highlights

> Ricoh had a semiconductor factory with the most advanced facilities [...] that factory was only operating at 10% capacity.

> It seems like the engineers at Ricoh were starving for the challenge of working on some new technology. Even more important to them was the idea that if they worked at it, they could take Donkey Kong home!

> The one Ricoh suggested was a CPU called 6502. It wasn’t widely used at the time [...] reason we used it was that it would be hard to analyse.