A Book truly "unique for tits time"

This week's book is The History of Nintendo (Volume 1) by Florent Gorges (in collaboration with Isao Yamazaki).

As a big fan of trivia and history in general, I'm enjoying it thus far. Already, some of the things it reveals have been informative and helped to fill in the blanks and explanations for Nintendo's current practices. Specifically, Yamauchi's being quoted as saying that price point is more important than being on the technological cutting edge (in reference to the Custom series of Optoelectronic SP guns (think the NES Zapper, but from nearly 20 years earlier).

Plus, the few pages spent on establishing the historical context of hanafuda cards from which Nintendo was born is very quickly done and quite a dense read. It doesn't go into great historical detail, but still. It's a good overview.

The book's written in a style that just flows from the page. I came into it expecting it to be a quick read, and so far it's been just that. However, that quote in this entry's title is from the book's early pages, and though there hasn't been a goof of equal or greater substance yet, the text's having been translated from the original French is quite obvious on a regular basis.

Standard English rules are broken, idioms are misused, and apostrophes are missing or misplaced where they have quite a bit of power over meaning. With all that said, it reminds me of speaking in English with some of my students and mid-level adult speakers while working in South Korea. If you're a big stickler for grammatical and idiomatic correctness, then you'll probably be too distracted to enjoy the anecdote-driven history that the book offers.

Personally, I find the errors grating, but they don't make the book unreadable nor do they completely obscure meaning, so it's all right. In fact, it's kind of a curious way that the charm of Japan is captured in the book.