I begged for six months.

Mario Party, for the GameCube I already treasured, and by December I'd worn everybody down enough that I could see it sitting under the tree. Perfectly wrapped. I knew exactly what was in there.

So on Christmas Eve I snuck out, slowly unwrapped it, played it all night long, rewrapped it perfectly, and put it back under the tree.

Then I faked the surprise in the morning. (LuCKY Me they didn’t know how to see my saved game history.)

So I stole from my own parents to play a game eight hours early, lied about it before breakfast, and Nintendo still had my money for the next twenty years.

I was that kid. I am still that kid.

I grew up with a nasty stepmother who banned Pokémon (she was nasty for other reasons, too) so I snipped a hole in the seam of a stuffed animal, slid the cartridges in one at a time, and stashed my least favorite ones under the mattress because I knew that's where she'd look. She found the decoys. She stopped looking. I kept my yellow Pikachu Game Boy Color cartridge.

The screen was the size of a postage stamp and the backlight didn't exist, so I played under the blanket with a flashlight, the plastic buttons clicking soft enough that she wouldn't hear. I memorized the route from Pallet Town to Viridian City because it was mine. She couldn't take it. She didn't even know it existed.

Those games were the remnants of the good parts of my childhood.

You probably weren't smuggling Game Boys. But you had something. A drawer, a box, a password, a place where the good things lived that the rest of your life couldn't reach.

Someone you serve has that drawer too.

Nintendo posted operating losses three years running, 2012 through 2014, and had only just clawed back to profitable by 2015. So in November 2016 they shipped the thing that made no sense: a $60 box with 30 games built in and no way to buy a thirty-first.

A company that lives on selling you their beloved Italian plumber in the next game released a product you couldn't buy games for.

The NES Classic moved 1.5 million units as a limited run. The Super NES Classic followed at $80 and passed 5 million by March 2018. Together, the retro line cleared 10 million units and accounted for 4% of company sales across eight quarters.

Tatsumi Kimishima, then the company's president, put it plainly in a 2017 corporate briefing. The reissues were "an opportunity to draw consumers' attention to our latest game system, Nintendo Switch" (FM Magazine).

The $60 NES Classic was a door. 19.6 million people walked through it and bought a $300 Switch on the backside.

Bad news comes free. Roy Baumeister has a paper called "Bad Is Stronger Than Good" that puts numbers on something you already feel: a bad event lands harder and stays longer than a good one of the same size. Grief and fear file themselves. Nobody has to work at remembering their worst year.

Nostalgia is the opposite. Nothing about it is automatic. It's a decision to go back and get the good. And you only make that decision if you need it.

I needed good. That's what the stuffed animal was.

Nostalgia does nothing for kids or teenagers, who have nothing to look back on yet. It lands on people one generation removed. Marketing consultant Luan Wise, quoted in that same FM Magazine piece, names the trigger: adults get nostalgic about childhood toys once they have children of their own.

I have two boys. We play Mario Kart on the couch, we tear open card packs on the kitchen floor, and every single time I want two things at once. I want them to have their own remnants of good. And selfishly, quietly, I want to live mine again through them.

So I'm the customer that research predicted, right down to the year.

In 2014, Lasaleta, Sedikides and Vohs found that people value money less when they're nostalgic. Warm memory in, price sensitivity down.

That's a real lever, and it points at people while they're soft.

Which is a polite way of saying a warm memory makes me worse at math. And I just told you about the two boys, the Mario Kart, and the card packs, so... yeah. I'm the mark.

I'm torn on nostalgia marketing, so I'll just say where I land.

It's fine to get paid for making something people love. Disney does it, Star Wars does it, Nintendo does it, and nobody in that Tokyo line felt robbed.

But here's the honest caveat: Nintendo already owned the nostalgia, and you almost certainly don't. Nobody is nostalgic for your brand yet, which means the half of this that transfers is the other half: building the thing now that becomes somebody's remnant later.

The American video game market didn't dip in 1983, it fell out of the sky: arcade revenue down 66%, console revenue down 93% inside three years, Atari down $536 million and burying its unsold cartridges in a New Mexico landfill. Nobody wanted a video game machine in the house. So when the NES reached the States in 1985, Nintendo didn't sell a console. It sold a toy, with a robot named R.O.B. and a plastic light gun in the box, to a kid who had no idea the category was supposed to be dead. By 1987 they held 65% of the hardware market and Atari had fallen from 80% to 24% (Banknotes).

They built that memory by handing a kid an object during the one year nobody would touch the category. Thirty-one years later they sold it back for sixty dollars.

Whether you built the memory or you're renting one somebody else built, the line is the same. A brand opening with a sepia photo it had nothing to do with is charging you for work it never did.

The takeaway:

🤿 Dive Deeper: every specimen I tear apart ends up in The Lab Notes, my swipe library. Filter it, group it, steal from it.

Bottom Line: Go make something worth hiding in a stuffed animal.

Until next time,

—Payton ✌️