A front to videogame business

One of the best ways to convince someone to do something, is to convince him he is successful. The only problem is when the guy realizes it was fake that things come crashing down. It works really well, in fact if you ever read about Dispruption it is about people that are convinced they are right.

Bill Gates can play this game incredibly well. He sold an operating system to IBM, and then began to let anyone who had a similar computer use it. IBM thought everything was alright with this because people needed the right computers to use the OS. This is when Microsoft began to let other companies make computers without the need of IBM. In other words, the company that helped design computers for decades, lost to an upstart. Gates used these tricks to continue dominating the PC culture after that.

There have been accusations that Gates cheated. In fact, there was a lawsuit by Apple that said Microsoft stole everything. It would have been a win as well, but it turned out both companies had been basing their OS on a Xerox computer design. Xerox designed everything, but didn't think computers needed to have something like Windows, or be open as they are now.

This is a really big deal for gamers, because many companies have fallen for the same thing. In fact, it has been around since Pong.

Hollywood is pretty well known as the big movie makers of the world. If you saw it in a theater, it was likely made, or produced by someone living in the Southern California megalopolis. It is also famously known to be run by the mob. In fact sales during the height of mob rule in Hollywood have always been something of a guessing game. One director even said he never knew how much they really made.

When Atari was forming, they got funding from what was likely gangsters. The entire time Bushnell was smoking pot with his employees, the funding came from outside sources. He told new employees that they were funded by General Electric.

To give you an idea, when Nintendo was promoting its new arcade game Donkey Kong, the president of Nintendo of America realized that most of the distribution groups he worked with were mob run.

So, how much of the videogame industry is run by the mob? Who knows! Thats the reason why it is so fascinating. Many arcade companies made pachinko machines, which at various times were run by Yakuza. This doesn’t mean that anyone at the company itself was working for the mob.

This is the trick that works so well. So long as the company itself seems to be doing ok, no one is worried. If the distributors brought back money for the games, there really was no way to track how much of it was actually from the arcade games. If someone says the company is selling so many units, it would be hard to find out if this is true. It is even more true when you know that checking can get you in trouble.

We praise guys like Bushnell for starting so much with videogames, but how much of it was simply a front? Every member of the company could be under the impression that everything was working well, or that they had to cut corners around things, but never know what was actually going on. When you go to work, you don’t worry about everyone else in the building. It’s doubtful you realize what all is going on with the company as a whole. Even the president, and several members of his staff will see a profit, and cost group, workers, and the product being sold. They will not go further from that because they believe the numbers to be real.

That’s the trick, in the same way Atari was ‘funded by GE’. The people who we would talk to would never know. Do I think every distribution company is a drug front? Not really. I say this especially since I am working to get interviews with local distributors right now. I really don’t think anyone I talk to will have any ties to the mob. I do know that many times distributors have a hard time talking about their industry. The reason why is likely that they don’t know who is what.

When we do research like this, the best trick is to believe that most people involved were either out of the loop, or scared. The big scary guys rarely show up. If they did, it would make the front to obvious, and ruin a good thing.