Last month MITI, the powerful Japanese trade ministry, chastised Nishi for printing directions for gulf war computer games in one of his glossy magazines. The ministry seemed concerned that the articles would tarnish the name of Japanese computer games, which tend not to be military. At the same time, Pravda accused Nishi of running a software contest in the U.S.S.R. that allegedly robbed the Soviet Union of royalties on innovative and potentially profitable games. In both cases, Nishi insisted that he’d done nothing wrong.
But then Nishi knows well the perils of international wheeling and dealing. His peregrinations began in 1978 when he flew to see fellow wunderkind Bill Gates, who was then founding what would become software powerhouse Microsoft. Nishi became Microsoft’s Japanese representative. By the mid-’80s he was flying to the United States so frequently that he kept his watch and body clock on Honolulu time. At first Nishi scored repeated coups, from inspiring the first popular laptop computer (the Tandy 100, which used Microsoft software) to convincing Gates that writing software for IBM was a good idea. But by 1986, Gates’s conservative style was clashing with Nishi’s flamboyance. He was chartering helicopters to take him to meetings; once he spent $1 million to build a life-size dinosaur for a television program promoting computers.
Gates broke off the business relationship just as the American company was going public. Gates was suddenly America’s youngest billionaire; Nishi still owed Microsoft a half-million dollars, primarily in personal debt. In a comeback attempt Nishi proposed a new home-computer system called MSX. While widely promoted, and intended as an international standard, MSX never took off.
ASCII, however, remained highly profitable, producing stylish, techno-hip magazines, so popular in Japan that Nishi’s finances quickly rebounded. And now he has bounced back with even bigger plans. He is betting on the future meld of computers, televisions and satellites - envisioning a time when consumers can buy full-length movies on compact discs and view them on wall-size screens. As with Jobs, Nishi’s role is less hands-on engineer than visionary. In his view, for example, the giant home video screen will also connect to satellite transmissions of sophisticated Nintendo-style games.
Nishi is now planning to move most of his operations north to the city of Sendai, where land costs far less than property in Tokyo. He wants to include a private airport at his corporate headquarters, a rarity in Japan. (While not currently licensed, Nishi loves to fly and recently bought a secondhand T-38 jet trainer in the United States.) He has also purchased the Japanese subsidiary of independent film distributor Vestron, following Sony’s purchase of Columbia.
Nishi works from 7 in the morning until midnight, employing two secretaries, one for days, one for nights. He has cut down his overseas travel by using picture-phones for conferences; his watch is now on Tokyo time. The picture-phones use chips that his own engineers designed. On weekends he works on personal projects: the latest, a pocket-size “electronic wallet,” with a folding keyboard for typing reports, addresses and expense accounts.
Weekends are also reserved for his wife and children in the Tokyo apartment he found by riding in a helicopter, looking for buildings with nice views. His home is filled with modern art, mostly Chagall lithographs, overseen by a curator. And also a remarkable number of compact discs. “I have over 50 versions of Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’,” he says, but adds that he always reprograms the disc player so that the winter movement comes first, then spring. “When you are unhappy, you first listen to unhappy music.” Says Nishi: “I have many moods, high and low, and the difference can be big.”
Nishi strongly defends his position in the recent controversies. In Japan, he told the trade ministry that it had no right to meddle in publishing. MITI backed off. The software-writing contest in the Soviet Union, inspired by the phenomenally popular game Tetris, written in Moscow and sold worldwide, garnered more than 4,000 entries. But then Pravda claimed that Nishi was trying to steal Soviet software. The dispute was over how royalties would be paid; Nishi wanted the money to go directly to the winning programmers, rather than to the state. Nishi remains adamant that the fees should go to individual Soviets, so he has delayed publishing the 23 winning games. For now, the contest is on hold.
Nishi’s belief in free enterprise has paid off. His stock in ASCII makes him worth more than $100 million. “Starting the company was an accident,” says Nishi. “I just felt this is something fun. The accident brought me a fortune.” He is currently redecorating his newly acquired Manhattan apartment on Central Park South, not far from Steve Jobs’s pied a terre. Let’s hope New York is big enough for them both.
