WHAT NINTENDO CAN TEACH US ABOUT SAVING OCR

I love Nintendo.

Not just because I grew up playing it, although I probably spent enough hours on Super Mario Bros. Zelda, Contra,and Mega Man to make my parents question every life decision they’d made up to that point.

Don’t worry, I’d soon make them question even more.

I love Nintendo because I genuinely think they pulled off one of the greatest business recoveries in modern history, and almost nobody outside of business schools ever talks about it.

The funny thing is, when people think of Nintendo today, they think of Mario, Pokémon, Zelda, and a company that’s been wildly successful for forty years. What they don’t think about is that Nintendo walked into an industry that had essentially committed suicide.

The video game crash of 1983 wasn’t a slowdown. It wasn’t a recession. It wasn’t a couple companies having bad years. The North American video game market went from an estimated $3.2 billion in annual revenue in 1983 to roughly $100 million just two years later. Ninety-seven percent of the market evaporated. Imagine waking up tomorrow and discovering that 97% of CrossFit affiliates had closed, HYROX couldn’t fill a single heat, and every supplement company was liquidating inventory for pennies on the dollar. That’s what the video game industry looked like.

Why did it happen?

Greed.

It’s almost always greed.

Everyone wanted in because everyone saw easy money. Atari had become a household name. Home consoles were exploding. Investors wanted returns. Developers wanted contracts. Retailers wanted inventory. Suddenly there were dozens of companies pumping out games as fast as they possibly could. Quality became secondary to volume because somebody somewhere convinced themselves that if they could just get another cartridge on a shelf before Christmas, people would buy it.

Sound familiar?

OCR had its boom too.

Race series were popping up everywhere. Every few months someone announced the next organization that was going to “change the sport forever.” Certifications started multiplying. Every gym with a pull-up rig suddenly became an OCR training facility. People who’d run a handful of races were suddenly experts. Somewhere along the way, obstacle course racing stopped being about obstacle course racing and started becoming another business opportunity.

That’s usually the beginning of the end.

People love blaming E.T. for the video game crash. It’s become one of those stories everybody repeats because it’s simple. Atari rushed an E.T. game into production in about five weeks, it was terrible, millions of cartridges went unsold, and eventually they buried truckloads of them in a New Mexico landfill. Great story. Makes for a fantastic documentary.

The problem is, it wasn’t true.

Well…it was true, but it wasn’t the reason.

E.T. didn’t kill the industry. It simply became the poster child for what the industry had already become. There were hundreds of mediocre games flooding the market. Consumers had stopped trusting publishers. Retailers couldn’t tell the difference between quality and garbage because everyone claimed their game was revolutionary. E.T. just happened to be the most famous train wreck.

Again…sound familiar?

Atari Didn’t Kill Video Games. Success Did.

Take notes, Spartan. 

By the early 1980s Atari had become so dominant that they stopped behaving like a company trying to earn customers and started behaving like a company that assumed customers would never leave. That’s a dangerous place for any business to be. When you’re first, when you’re biggest, and when money is pouring in faster than you can count it, it’s easy to convince yourself that every decision you make is the right one simply because you’re the one making it.

Instead of protecting the customer, Atari started protecting quarterly profits. Games were rushed through development because Christmas deadlines mattered more than quality. Third-party publishers were springing up everywhere because everyone wanted a piece of the gold rush. Shelves became flooded with games that looked interchangeable, played terribly, and existed for one reason—to separate parents from their money before they knew any better.

Consumers eventually figured it out.

Funny how that works.

People will tolerate being taken advantage of exactly once before they stop trusting the entire industry. They don’t usually punish just the bad companies. They punish everyone. That’s exactly what happened. Retailers couldn’t tell which games were worth stocking anymore because there were simply too many. Customers couldn’t tell which games were worth buying because every box promised the next revolutionary experience. Eventually they just stopped buying altogether.

I’ve seen this movie before.

OCR exploded because it was different. Then organizations multiplied. Race directors multiplied. Coaches multiplied. Certifications multiplied. Every few months another person was announcing they’d figured out the future of obstacle course racing. Somewhere along the way the goal shifted from building something worth participating in to simply getting another logo into the marketplace.

Industries almost never collapse because one company makes one terrible decision.

They collapse because everybody starts believing that success is permanent.

Here’s where Nintendo did something brilliant that almost nobody talks about.

They didn’t walk into America after the video game crash and try convincing everyone that video games deserved another chance. That would’ve been a losing battle before it even started. Consumers had already made up their minds. Retailers had been burned by mountains of worthless inventory. The phrase “video game” itself had become associated with cheap products, broken promises, and an industry that had nearly collapsed under its own greed.

So Nintendo stopped selling “video games.”

Not literally, of course, but psychologically.

They called it the Nintendo Entertainment System, not a video game console. The cartridges became Game Paks. The console became a Control Deck. The machine itself was designed to look more like a VCR than a toy sitting on a child’s bedroom floor. They even bundled R.O.B., a goofy little robot that honestly wasn’t all that useful, because toy stores were still willing to stock toys while wanting absolutely nothing to do with video games. Nintendo understood that their biggest challenge wasn’t building a better product. Their biggest challenge was getting people to give the product a chance before dismissing it because of what they thought it was.

I think obstacle course racing is facing the exact same problem today.

The second people hear “OCR,” most already have an opinion. They picture mud runs. They picture electric wires, costumes, people climbing over walls for social media photos, or a niche sport filled with athletes they assume they’ll never be able to keep up with. Before they’ve ever touched a rig or carried a bucket, they’ve already decided it isn’t for them.

The frustrating part is that OCR isn’t really what we’re selling.

We’re selling stronger bodies that can hike fourteeners without falling apart halfway up the mountain. We’re selling confidence to tackle things people once believed were impossible. We’re selling grip strength that carries over into everyday life, better balance as people age, cardiovascular endurance, resilience, problem solving under fatigue, and the simple satisfaction of discovering that your body is capable of far more than you’ve been told.

The obstacles are simply the classroom where those lessons happen.

Maybe that’s where our marketing has gone wrong. We’ve spent years trying to convince people they should love obstacle course racing, when maybe obstacle course racing shouldn’t be the headline at all. Maybe it’s time to stop asking people if they want to train for OCR and start asking them if they want to become more capable human beings. Do they want to climb mountains? Carry their grandchildren? Lose weight without staring at another treadmill? Build confidence by accomplishing things they never imagined they could do?

If the answer is yes, they’re already looking for what OCR provides.

They just don’t know it yet.

That’s exactly what Nintendo understood. They didn’t change what was inside the box. Super Mario Bros. was still a video game. Duck Hunt was still a video game. The experience never changed. What changed was the invitation. They removed the label that carried all the baggage and let people experience the value before asking them to embrace the category.

I honestly believe obstacle course racing needs to do the same thing if it ever wants another real growth cycle. We don’t need to hide what OCR is, and we certainly shouldn’t be ashamed of it. But maybe we need to stop leading with the three letters that already have a preconceived meaning attached to them. Build capable people. Build stronger hikers. Build resilient parents. Build mountain athletes. Build everyday humans who can actually use the bodies they spend so much time trying to improve.

Then, once they’re hooked, they’ll realize they’ve been training for OCR all along.

Nintendo didn’t save video games by selling more video games.

They saved them by giving people a reason to care before they ever realized they were buying one.

Maybe that’s exactly what obstacle course racing needs to do next.

Nintendo Created Their Greatest Rival

This might be my favorite part of the entire story because it’s so unbelievably human.

Everybody talks about Nintendo and Sony as if they were always enemies.

They weren’t.

Sony actually helped Nintendo build the Super Nintendo by designing its sound chip, and the relationship was good enough that the two companies started working together on what was supposed to become a CD-ROM version of the Super Nintendo. The project was literally called the “Play Station.” Two words.

Think about that for a second.

Sony wasn’t trying to take over gaming.

Sony was trying to help Nintendo stay on top.

Then Nintendo got nervous.

Looking back, you can understand why. The contract reportedly gave Sony significant control over CD licensing, and Nintendo wasn’t thrilled with the idea of another company having that much leverage over their future. That’s a reasonable concern. What wasn’t reasonable was how they handled it.

At the 1991 Consumer Electronics Show, Sony proudly announced the partnership to the world. The next day Nintendo walked on stage and announced they were partnering with Philips instead. No private conversation. No heads-up. No chance for Sony to save face. Imagine spending years building a product only to find out your business partner dumped you while you’re standing in the audience listening to the announcement with everybody else.

I’ve seen divorces handled with more professionalism.

Most companies would’ve packed up and gone home. Sony didn’t.

They got mad.

Really mad.

Instead of abandoning the project, they decided to build their own console. That console became the PlayStation, one of the most successful entertainment products in history with more than 100 million original PlayStations sold and well over half a billion PlayStation consoles sold across every generation since.

That’s one of the greatest examples I’ve ever seen of how underestimating someone can create the very competitor you’re afraid of.

It’s also a reminder that how you treat people matters.

Sometimes the person you dismiss today spends the next decade making sure you regret it.

So why am I talking about Nintendo?

Because I don’t think Nintendo became Nintendo because they made better video games.

That’s certainly part of the story, but I don’t think it’s the reason they’ve managed to stay relevant for over 140 years as a company and nearly forty years in the modern gaming industry.

I think they understood something that almost every successful company eventually forgets.

You don’t always have to chase the market.

Sometimes you create one.

That’s a completely different philosophy than what most businesses are taught today. Every business podcast tells you to pivot. Every consultant tells you to follow consumer demand. Every marketing guru tells you to look at what’s trending, study your competitors, and find out what customers are buying before deciding what you should build.

Then five years later they all wonder why every company looks exactly the same.

If everybody is following the same map, eventually everybody ends up standing on the same piece of ground, fighting over the same customers while convincing themselves that changing the paint color on the walls somehow makes them different.

Business people eventually gave this a name.

The Red Ocean.

Everybody swimming in the same water, fighting over the same fish until eventually there’s not enough left for anybody.

Nintendo looked at what Sega was doing. Then Sony. Then Microsoft. Every generation became another technology race. Faster processors. Better graphics. More memory. Online gaming. Blu-ray. 4K. Ray tracing. Teraflops. Every company trying to convince consumers that this year’s machine was worth buying because it had more of something than last year’s machine.

Nintendo never really seemed all that interested.

Instead of asking, “How do we beat PlayStation at being PlayStation?” they asked a much more interesting question.

“What if we stopped competing with them altogether?”

That philosophy gave us the Wii.

On paper, the Wii should’ve been destroyed.

The Xbox 360 was significantly more powerful. The PlayStation 3 wasn’t even playing the same game technologically. Reviewers obsessed over graphics comparisons, processing power and hardware specifications. If the internet had existed in its current form back then, YouTube would’ve been filled with side-by-side videos explaining why Nintendo was finished.

Instead, Nintendo sold over 100 million Wii consoles.

Not because they convinced PlayStation owners to switch.

Not because Xbox players suddenly cared less about graphics.

They sold them because they found millions of people who had never owned a console in the first place.

Grandparents bought Wiis.

Parents bought Wiis.

Retirement homes bought Wiis.

Physical therapy clinics bought Wiis.

Families that hadn’t touched a controller in twenty years suddenly had one sitting in the living room because Grandma could bowl with her grandchildren without needing to know what a graphics card was.

That’s the part that fascinates me.

Nintendo didn’t win by stealing customers.

They won by creating entirely new ones.

Most businesses never think that way.

They’re too busy trying to convince someone to leave the gym across town, switch insurance companies, buy coffee somewhere else, or race somebody else’s event instead of theirs.

They’re not creating demand.

They’re redistributing it.

And I think OCR has spent years making exactly that mistake.

Instead of asking, “How do we introduce obstacle course racing to people who’ve never even considered trying it?” we’ve spent an awful lot of time asking, “How do we convince the same five hundred people to come race with us instead of the other organization this weekend?”

Those are completely different conversations.

One grows a sport.

The other just shifts money from one cash register to another.

It’s like opening another pizza place across the street from three existing pizza places and acting like you’ve revolutionized the restaurant industry because twenty people decided to buy pepperoni from you instead of the guy next door.

Congratulations.

You didn’t create new pizza lovers.

You just changed whose register the money went into Friday night.

I see the same thing happening throughout fitness.

Another HYROX affiliate opens.

Another DEKA affiliate announces itself.

Another “functional fitness” gym appears with black walls, turf, sleds, LED lighting, motivational quotes painted on concrete, and social media videos in slow motion where somebody dramatically claps chalk into the air while cinematic music tells you they’re changing lives.

Everybody claims they’ve reinvented fitness.

Then you walk inside and realize they’re all selling the same thing with a different logo.

That’s never interested me.

It still doesn’t.

People ask us all the time why we don’t pivot. Why not become another HYROX gym? Why not lean harder into DEKA? Why not become a ninja facility? Why not make OCR a tiny piece of what we do instead of the foundation?

Because somebody has to keep building the thing that made a lot of us fall in love with this in the first place.

Obstacle course racing wasn’t designed to be sanitized. It wasn’t meant to happen under perfect lighting, climate control and Bluetooth speakers while you rotate neatly between stations on rubber flooring.

It was messy.

It was uncomfortable.

It taught people how to solve problems while exhausted, not just repeat movements while fresh.

It forced you to carry awkward objects because life has never once handed anyone a perfectly balanced Olympic barbell with knurling placed exactly where you’d like it.

It forced you to think when your heart rate was through the roof. It forced you to adapt when the obstacle in front of you wasn’t the obstacle you expected. It rewarded patience just as much as strength and punished ego just as quickly as poor preparation.

Somewhere along the way, we started trying to make OCR look like everything else.

Maybe that’s exactly backwards.

Maybe the thing that made obstacle course racing valuable was the fact that it wasn’t everything else.

That’s why we built HartFit the way we did.

Could we have poured concrete across the property? Absolutely.

Could we have lined the place with treadmills, mirrors and rows of machines? Of course.

Could we have painted everything black, hung neon lights from the ceiling and blasted electronic music until people confused sensory overload with intensity?

Probably.

It also would’ve made us look like thousands of other facilities.

Instead we searched for altitude.

We left the grounds technical and challenging.

We built obstacles.

We left Colorado exactly the way Colorado is because race day doesn’t care whether you trained in seventy-two degrees with perfect lighting.

Some days the wind tries to blow you into Kansas.

Some days it’s snowing sideways.

Some days you’re baking in ninety-five degrees wondering why you thought this sounded like fun.

Good.

That’s reality.

Reality doesn’t ask whether you’re comfortable before handing you a challenge, and neither should training.

Does that mean we’ll probably always be smaller than businesses chasing whatever the newest fitness trend happens to be?

Maybe.

I’m perfectly okay with that.

Nintendo proved something that I think gets overlooked because everyone focuses on Mario instead.

Being different is always risky.

Being the same is eventually fatal.

I’d rather spend the next twenty years building something a thousand people genuinely believe in than spend the next five chasing ten thousand people who’ll disappear the moment somebody else invents the next shiny object.

Because that’s what trends do.

They change.

Algorithms change.

Marketing changes.

Fitness changes.

The people who spent the last decade telling you CrossFit was the only answer eventually told you functional fitness was the only answer. Now they’re telling you Zone 2 is the only answer. Give it another five years and they’ll discover another revolutionary concept that somehow requires buying another certification.

Meanwhile, carrying something heavy up a hill still matters.

Climbing a rope still matters.

Getting yourself over a wall still matters.

Learning to think clearly when your lungs are on fire and your heart rate is pushing 180 still matters.

Those aren’t trends.

They’re human capabilities.

Those are worth preserving.

Maybe that’s our Blue Ocean.

Not because it’s easy.

Not because it’s the biggest market.

But because almost everybody else looked at that water and decided there wasn’t enough left to fight over.

History has a funny way of rewarding the people willing to swim where everyone else stopped looking.

So come on in.

The water is perfect.