A few years ago, before embarking upon a particularly daunting road trip, my wife and I bought an Amazon Fire for our 6-year-old son. How would I rate the experience? The settings were a nightmare to navigate, the games were full of ads and in-game purchases, and the screen broke after a year — one star. Last Christmas, facing the same journey, we bought a Nintendo Switch. The only issue with that device has been the embarrassing number of hours I’ve sunk into playing Super Mario Bros. Wonder. 

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Keza MacDonald’s new history of the company that made the device, Super Nintendo: The Game Changing Company That Unlocked the Power of Play, isn’t perfect, but the Nintendo Switch pretty much is. And her book goes a long way in explaining why. The book is at its best when operating under the “great man” theory of corporate history, and Nintendo has more than a few. Consider the early chapter on Shigeru Miyamoto, who got his first big break in 1980 when Nintendo ordered 3,000 arcade cabinets for its Space Invaders rip-off Radar Scope. Only 1,000 sold, and he was tasked with creating a game compatible with the unsold machines. The result was Donkey Kong: the first game with a rudimentary plot (that monkey sure does like that princess), the first game that “wasn’t a maze, a racer, or a shooter,” and, amazingly, the first game in which a character can jump.

That character — the little mustachioed guy in red overalls — was also Miyamoto’s creation. Mario,........

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