‘Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America’ by Jeff Ryan

The Nintendo Co. began modestly in the late 1880s as a maker of hanafuda decks — cards decorated with seasonal flowers used in traditional Japanese games (including koi-koi, which figured in the recent film “Summer Wars”). Today, the games and electronics giant has a reported market value of more than $85 billion. Jeff Ryan traces the rise of the company and of Mario, the plumber with the handlebar mustache and red overalls, in his unsatisfying book, “Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America.”

The growth of Nintendo was linked to the rapid, if erratic, rise of video games. Ryan tracks the developments in hardware and software, but his descriptions of the major players at the company would have more authority if he included interviews with some of them (he says, in his acknowledgments, that the company’s not very cooperative “with the press when it comes to books”). And it seems odd to publish a book on video games without any illustrations.

Although the Super Mario franchise was Nintendo’s first big hit, it’s not clear why Ryan focuses exclusively on the Mario games. He makes only brief mention of Pokémon, which has sold more than 200 million games and still has millions of enthusiastic followers. It’s also proved more adaptable to other media. There have been 14 Pokémon features, and the various Pokémon TV series have racked up more than 700 episodes — far more than the Mario Bros.

Ryan’s fixation with Mario might seem less puzzling if his reporting was more careful. But his account of the disastrous 1993 live-action feature “Super Mario Bros.” starring Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo doesn’t even mention the film’s title (although it appears in the index). When he recounts some of the many Mario-related products, he carries on as if Mario were the first character that was ever the subject of a major licensing deal and fails to establish how Mario compares with the licensing champions Mickey Mouse and Snoopy.

According to his biography, Ryan has reviewed more than 500 video games for the Katrillion website, and he juxtaposes straightforward, if enthusiastic, prose with unsuccessful attempts at being clever and using too many tangled metaphors. Discussing the failure of some early game companies, for example, he states, “The writing had been on the wall for a year already, when in 1982 Atari’s projected earnings were reset to be less Daedalian. After that, it was a matter of time before game companies too close to the sun started to fall out of the sky.” Or: “Since the late 1970s, Sega wasn’t so much the Pepsi to Nintendo’s Coke as it was the RC Cola. It had been Rosencrantzing and Guildensterning its way around the gaming world for decades, always buffeted by the wake of others, rarely the one making waves.”

Are “all avenues of our lives … turning into video games,” as Ryan asserts? If they are, one hopes the games offer more imagination and panache than in this effortful book.

Solomon is the author, most recently, of “The Art of ‘Toy Story 3’” and “Tale as Old as Time: The Art and Making of ‘Beauty and the Beast.’”