Biography provided by Chris Kohler, Editorial Director of Digital Eclipse, a game developer devoted to preserving the history of video games.
When the courier arrived with a small parcel from Kyoto, Don James signed for it. He carried the box inside Nintendo of America, which consisted of five people in a warehouse in Tukwila, Washington. Inside were ROM chips containing a new game, fresh from Japan, called Donkey Kong.
The chips in that box would change Don James' life forever. Over the next 43 years, he would go from the warehouse manager of a five-person arcade game distributor to the executive vice president of operations of one of the key players in the global game business. Along the way, he took a leading role not just in transforming Nintendo into an entertainment powerhouse, but in the creation of the modern-day gaming industry itself, helping to launch the ESA, the ESRB, E3, and the AIAS.
All of that was far away in the summer of 1981 – although, in truth, it was closer than it seemed. The previous year, Nintendo Co., Ltd. in Japan had established its American subsidiary. Though initially based in New York City, they soon moved to a warehouse in Tukwila, near Seattle, so that arcade games delivered via cargo ship from Japan would arrive more quickly.
A Seattle company called Far East Video originally distributed Nintendo's games into arcades, bars, restaurants, and anywhere else a coin-operated machine would fit in the booming arcade market of the early 1980s. When Nintendo of America needed a cabinet designed for an upcoming game that was being finished up in Japan, Far East Video's cofounder Ron Judy said he might have an in – his friend's daughter was dating this kid who was finishing up a degree in industrial design at the University of Washington.
Don James took the assignment, building a prototype cabinet for the game – an outer-space shoot-em-up called Radar Scope – then went back to school. After he graduated in 1981, he asked Ron Judy for a letter of recommendation so he could start job-hunting. On August 10, he went over to the Tukwila warehouse – which was nearly empty, awaiting a shipment of 2,000 Radar Scope cabinets – to collect it.
"As I was leaving," Don recalls, "he said: 'Don, this may be below your education, but we need a warehouse manager.'"
Well, he thought, it's a job.
The team at Nintendo of America knew it wasn't going to be able to sell all of the 2,000 Radar Scope cabinets that Don James was now stacking up on pallets. The space shooter just wasn't as popular as they'd hoped. They had asked designers in Japan if there was a fresh new game they could swap into the cabinets. What they got was Donkey Kong.
"I couldn't stop playing it," Don says. "But we had no idea Donkey Kong was going to be such a huge hit." They set the game up in The Spot Tavern in nearby Renton, where it immediately started making over ten times as much money as the bar's Radar Scope machine. Now Don James was not only the warehouse manager, he was also the shipping manager, zooming around the otherwise unpopulated warehouse on his skateboard as he prepped the 2,000 former Radar Scope machines to be shipped out around the country as Donkey Kong cabinets.
Originally, Nintendo of America was ordering complete, fully-built game cabinets from Japan. But the explosive popularity of Donkey Kong and long shipping times meant that they couldn't get the machines fast enough to meet demand. So it began manufacturing games in the warehouse, and Don was promoted to production manager.
"I oversaw the entire warehouse, including the crews that we hired to build the machines, and that focus on operations eventually led to me running operations but also operations-related departments," he says. "By the time I finished, it was a pretty diverse list, including consumer services, design, experiential marketing, real estate & facilities, manufacturing engineering, quality control, supply chain operations, purchasing, product testing, technical services and technical translation."
Nintendo continued to produce hit arcade games. In 1985, they had a new challenge – attempting to revive the home gaming market in the U.S., which had crashed spectacularly in 1983. Don temporarily moved to New York to help test-market the Nintendo Entertainment System. He designed the point-of-purchase displays for the NES, and led the teams that delivered the finished displays to retail stores.
"Each day we would drive around New York and New Jersey," he says. "At the end of each day, we’d go back to the warehouse, build the next day’s set of displays and load the vans, and then repeat the process. And we did that for three months straight."
The NES was an even bigger hit than the arcade game “Donkey Kong,” and Nintendo was now predominantly a consumer gaming company, which meant another new set of challenges. "I never had to do something for long before a new challenge came along," Don says. "The company never stayed the same. It was always changing, which made it extremely intellectually stimulating, and the people who I was able to work with were just fantastic."
As the game industry grew and matured, the challenges matured along with it, and some of the biggest ones were not going to be contained within the walls of Nintendo of America. In 1993, the United States Senate began holding hearings on the issue of violence in video games. "We needed a ratings system to help consumers make more informed choices about what they were buying[1] ," says Don. This meant that then-competitors in the industry were going to need to start working together in a formalized way.
Don James took the initiative in these efforts. "It was a bunch of us from different walks, and we decided to create a trade association," Don says. Originally called the Interactive Digital Software Association (IDSA), it is today known as the Entertainment Software Association (ESA); Don was one of its first board members.
The original purpose of the association was to form the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB). "I and others worked with a psychologist to come up with the age groups and actual icons, and that was the start of the ESRB," Don says.
"It was interesting to watch the dynamics of that come together, where everybody was very competitive and all of a sudden they had to shake hands and say, okay, we need to work together to make this happen," said Don in a 2014 interview. "I'm most proud of the fact that we were able to do it – that we were able to get everybody to agree on launching a rating system, because there was so much diversity and of course no one really in the industry was an expert on creating ratings."
Now sharing a common ratings system and trade group, the industry soon began to unite around another shared goal. "Back at the start, the games industry was exhibiting its games at CES, the Consumer Electronics Show," Don says. "But the CES expo center wasn’t big enough to have us along with everyone else, meaning the companies showing car stereos, TVs and consumer electronics. When we started, because of the lack of space, we were setting up in parking lots and tents, and so we decided to create our own trade show."
Ever since 1982, when Nintendo of America took out a tiny 10-by-20 space at the American Music Operators Association show to demonstrate Donkey Kong Jr. and Popeye arcade cabinets, Don had been in charge of designing and overseeing all of the company's trade show booths. So he was a natural fit when then-IDSA president Doug Lowenstein reached out to a select few in the industry to design a trade show just for video games, which became E3.
"My role was to help decide what venue, what time, how big the show would be, how we would allocate square footage, and so forth," Don says. Nintendo's own booths would eventually grow to 70,000 square-foot behemoths that were always packed full of games and attendees at every E3, each one designed by Don James and team.
Don's efforts not only supported the business of games, but the art of game creation; he co-founded the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences in 1991 and served on its board for most of its existence.
Since 1992, Nintendo of America has worked with the nonprofit Starlight Foundation to bring video games to seriously ill children via custom-designed gaming stations for use in children's hospitals. As gaming technology evolved, so too did Nintendo's designs for the hospital units. "When the Nintendo GameCube came out, I designed a version that was a lot more portable and designed to be secure for use in a hospital environment," Don says. "And then we just never stopped."
"Few in the industry have been involved in helping shape so many industry-defining organizations," says Martin Rae, who served as the president of the AIAS from 2010 to 2016. "Don has a great understanding of the balance needed between the creative minds behind fun and engaging games and the business side that drives the industry. Both sides have trusted him as a valued partner."
43 years to the day after Ron Judy stopped him from walking out the warehouse door, Don James retired from Nintendo of America having left a considerable legacy not just at the company itself, but within the entire gaming industry that sprouted around it.
And of course, he has no plans to stop. "I'm still figuring out what's next," he says, "but my first love is design, and so whatever I do, it'll probably involve that."
The Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences is honored to present its co-founder Don James with its Lifetime Achievement Award at the 28th Annual D.I.C.E. Awards.