Business jargon is the specialized language used by members of corporations and bureaucracies.

Also known
as corporate jargon, business-speak, and bureaucratese.
Business jargon typically includes buzzwords, vogue words, and euphemisms. Contrast with plain English.
Examples and Observations
"'He's successful in interfacing with clients we already have, but as for new clients, it's low-hanging fruit. He takes a high-
altitude view, but he doesn't drill down to that level of granularity where we might actionize new opportunities.'
"Clark winced. 'I remember that one. I think I may have had a minor stroke in the office when he said that.'"
(Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven. Alfred A. Knopf, 2014)
The Poisonous Spell of Business Jargon
"The next time you feel the need to reach out, touch base, shift a paradigm, leverage a best practice or join a tiger team,
by all means do it. Just don’t say you’re doing it.
"If you have to ask why, chances are you’ve fallen under the poisonous spell of business jargon. No longer solely the
province of consultants, investors and business-school types, this annoying gobbledygook has mesmerized the rank and
file around the globe.
"'Jargon masks real meaning,' says Jennifer Chatman, management professor at the University of California-Berkeley’s
Haas School of Business. 'People use it as a substitute for thinking hard and clearly about their goals and the direction
that they want to give others.'"
(Max Mallet, Brett Nelson and Chris Steiner, "The Most Annoying, Pretentious And Useless Business Jargon." Forbes,
January 26, 2012)
"Laser-Focused"
"At companies ranging from children’s book publishers to organic-food purveyors, CEOs are increasingly training
powerful beams of light on their targets. The phrase 'laser-focused' appeared in more than 250 transcripts of earnings
calls and investor events this year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, on pace to eclipse the 287 in all of 2012.
'It’s business jargon,' says L.J. Rittenhouse, CEO of Rittenhouse Rankings, who consults with executives on
communication and strategy. 'What would a more candid disclosure be? "We are focused." What does a laser have to do
with it?' . . .
"David Larcker, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business who has studied deception on investor
conference calls, says that when executives 'start using a lot of jargon, it makes you wonder about the believability.'
Rittenhouse, who analyzes shareholder letters for an annual report on CEO candor and reviews about 100 conference-
call transcripts each year, has found that companies that use 'fact-deficient, obfuscating generalities' have worse share
performance than more candid companies."
(Noah Buhayar, "The CEO's Favorite Cliché." Bloomberg Businessweek, September 23-29, 2013)
Business-Speak
"In an infamous December 2012 press release, Citigroup announced that it would begin 'a series of repositioning actions
that will further reduce expenses and improve efficiency,' resulting in 'streamlined operations and an optimized
consumer footprint across geographies.' Translation: 11,000 people would be repositioned out the door.
"Business-speak, with its heartless euphemisms and empty stock phrases, is the jargon that everyone loves to hate. . . .
"For several years, Mark Liberman, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania, has been keeping an eye on the words
and phrases that are condemned as business-speak, and he has noticed that as much as 'mission statements' and
'deliverables,' what gets under people’s skin are expressions like 'impactful,' 'at the end of the day,' and 'low-hanging
fruit.' As he has investigated these expressions, he noted in a post last month on the blog Language Log, he has found
that they are as common in sports, politics, social science, and other spheres as they are in business."
(Joshua J.
Friedman, "Jargon: It’s Not the Business World’s Fault!" The Boston Globe, September 15, 2013)
"Dharmesh's culture code incorporates elements of HubSpeak. For example, it instructs that when someone quits or
gets fired, the event will be referred to as 'graduation.' This really happens, over and over again. In my first month at
HubSpot I've witnessed several graduations, just in the marketing department. We'll get an email from Cranium saying,
'Team, Just letting you know that Derek has graduated from HubSpot, and we're excited to see how he uses his
superpowers in his next big adventure!'"
(Dan Lyons, Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble. Hachette, 2016)
Business-Speak in Higher Education
"As universities are beaten into the shapes dictated by business, so language is suborned to its ends. We have all heard
the robotic idiom of management, as if a button had activated a digitally generated voice. Like Newspeak in Nineteen
Eighty-Four, business-speak is an instance of magical naming, superimposing the imagery of the market on the idea of a
university–through ‘targets,' ‘benchmarks,' time-charts, league tables, ‘vision statements,' ‘content providers.' We may
laugh or groan, depending on the state of our mental health at the thickets of TLAs–three-letter acronyms, in the
coinage of the writer Richard Hamblyn–that accumulate like dental plaque. . . .
"The code conceals aggression: actions are undertaken in its name and justified by its rules; it pushes responsibility from
persons to systems. It pushes individuals to one side and replaces them with columns, boxes, numbers, rubrics, often
meaningless tautologies (a form will ask first for ‘aims,' and then for ‘objectives’)."
(Marina Warner, "Learning My Lesson." London Review of Books, March 19, 2015)
"The Epic Poetry of Modern Business"
"Jargon is an invaluable tool in massaging meaning for marketing purposes. Investment is a particularly fertile field.
Promoters may describe a start-up with no customers as 'pre-revenue,' optimistically implying that sales are inevitable.
Hoped-for turnover will be projected in a 'business plan,' a document used for raising finance and scrupulously ignored
thenceforth.
"Terminology that deflects criticism while bestowing spurious professionalism is essential to the manager. Hence the
phrase 'I'm outside the loop on that' excuses knuckle-dragging cluelessness. 'I'm afraid I don't have the bandwidth' is a
polite way of saying: 'You aren't important enough for me to help you.' And 'It is my understanding that . . .' allows the
speaker to assert vague suspicions as solid facts...
"Jargon is the epic poetry of modern business. It can turn a bunch of windbags in a meeting room into a 'quick wins
taskforce.' I once asked a handyman toiling in an office doorway whether he was installing a wheelchair ramp.
'No,' he said solemnly, 'it's a diversity access feature.'"
(Jonathan Guthrie, "Three Cheers for the Epic Poetry of Jargon." Financial Times, Dec. 13, 2007)
Financial Jargon: "Reversification"
"The images and metaphors keep doing headstands. To 'bail out' is to slop water over the side of a boat. That verb has
been reversified so that it means an injection of public money into a failing institution; taking something dangerous out
has turned into putting something vital in. 'Credit' has been reversified: it means debt. 'Inflation' means money being
worth less. 'Synergy' means sacking people. 'Risk' means precise mathematical assessment of probability. 'Noncore
assets' means garbage. These are all examples of how the process of innovation, experimentation, and progress in the
techniques of finance has been brought to bear on language, so that words no longer mean what they once did. It is not
a process intended to deceive, but . . . it confines knowledge to a priesthood—the priesthood of people who can speak
money."
(John Lanchester, "Money Talks." The New Yorker, August 4, 2014)
Greenspan's Fed-Jargon
"A special area of financial jargon is Greenspeak, the terms and phrases of Federal Reserve Board Chairman [1987-2006],
Alan Greenspan. For decades a small group of economists known as Fed-watchers, pored over the statements made by
the Federal Reserve, looking for indications of changes in Federal Reserve policy. Today, almost every investor and
business person in the U.S. listens to the latest Fed pronouncements. From his 1999 description of the technology stock
market as 'irrational exuberance,' to his 'considerable period,' 'soft patch,' and 'short-lived' descriptions of the economy
and monetary policy in 2003-2004, the words of Alan Greenspan [became] common in American business jargon." (W.
Davis Folsom, Understanding American Business Jargon: A Dictionary, 2nd ed. Greenwood, 2005)
n 1981, a young Swede called Owe Bergsten strolled through Singapore to pass the time before his flight home. It had
been something of a busman’s holiday - after a busy Christmas running his electronics shop, he and his business partners
had travelled to the Far East, idly looking for the products they could import before the next Christmas. Passing a camera
shop, he spotted a two-button LCD game called ‘Fire RC-04’ in the window. An acquaintance had told him not long
before that LCD games were the future, far better than the simple LED handhelds people had been playing recently.
Owe bought it on a whim.
Sitting down for the flight, he turned it on. Firemen holding a sheet blinked across the bottom of the display, catching
figures falling from a burning building and bouncing them across to safety. Bergsten got hooked. He played Fire for the
entirety of the return flight, playing pass-the-pad with his seat neighbour. When that flight was unexpectedly diverted
due to fog, he played it on the 3 hour bus ride he was then forced to take back home to Gothenburg. As he travelled,
always playing or waiting to play, he started to wonder who’d made this compulsive little rectangle, and if he could sell
them too.

Besides the labels for the buttons, he didn’t have much to go on when it came to information on the console itself:
‘Game & Watch’, ‘Made in Japan’, ‘Nintendo’. That last word seemed the best lead, so he called a local trade
organisation, and came away with a telex number. Soon after, somewhere in its tiny Tokyo export office, a Nintendo
employee pulled a short (and extremely abbreviated) message out of a printer. It read:

Apparently, no one really cared. A month and three more telexes later, Bergsten finally got a reply, asking him to explain
what his company actually did. He had a decision to make.

Over three decades later, an older, wiser, richer Bergsten looks at me across a table, presenting the telex he sent next.
His well-appointed office sits in a building furnished almost entirely by the money he’s made through, for and with
Nintendo over the years. That’s not an exaggeration: the building’s address is ‘Marios Gata 21’. 21 Mario Street. This
telex set the course for the rest of Bergsten’s life, introduced Nintendo to Europe on a scale it had never seen, even
arguably helped pave the way for its move into western markets as a whole. Without this piece of paper, gaming as we
know it could be entirely different.

He smiles as he shows it to me. “At that time it was very easy to lie, because the Internet was not invented.” So that first
formal communication to Nintendo was a lie?

“Yeah,” he laughs, “of course.”

I first heard of Owe Bergsten in a pub in 2017, his story told like some kind of Swedish folktale. It was the story of a man,
a lie, a video game handheld, and a business empire, and it was told with such breathless enthusiasm that I kept buying
pints so that I could hear more. This man sounded less like a successful business owner than some globe-hopping
trickster hero. The more I speak to people who know him, the more it becomes apparent that that’s just how people talk
about Owe Bergsten.

Two weeks later, unable to stop wondering if anything about the story I’d heard was actually true, I organised to meet
Bergsten at his office. When I arrived, I explained that I’d love for him to tell me the story of how he got here, from the
beginning. Bergsten clearly understands his public perception, and plays up to it: “You want the true version?” he joked.
“I have much better versions.”

It turns out the story that had captivated me in the pub was, practically beat-for-beat, the truth. Honestly, I don’t really
know how Bergsten could have better versions.

Today, his company, Bergsala, is effectively Nintendo Sweden. It’s also Nintendo Denmark, Norway and Finland. Scroll to
the bottom of any of those regions’ official Nintendo websites - you’ll see the name ‘Bergsala’ as part of the copyright
information. It’s a position it takes seriously - kids travel to its nondescript headquarters, situated off a motorway exit
south of Gothenberg, just to see the Mario warp pipe that pokes incongruously through the suburban scenery.

There’s a Nintendo museum - or possibly a shrine - in the Bergsala lobby, complete with a picture of a young Bergsten
beaming in a pile of Game & Watches. In his office, there’s a signed Miyamoto sketch of Mario, with hand-drawn Super
Mario World font-style text reading “To Mr. Bergsten!” It’s not just a testament to what Nintendo did for Bergsala, but
vice versa. In many ways, Sweden, through Bergsala, became a western testing ground for Nintendo, a huge early
success that proved there was a desire for the work of Miyamoto and Gunpei Yokoi outside of their homeland. And it
was built - in the nicest possible way - on a lie.

A very simple lie. Bergsten used his telex to present Bergsala as a much bigger company than it was, a distribution
organisation capable of acting as Nintendo’s sole Swedish distributor for Game & Watch. Essentially, it didn’t sound like
an electronics shop business with a side-hustle in Asian imports. It would have been unthinkable for Bergsten to guess
where that little fabrication would take him - but he very nearly didn’t cross the first few hurdles on that journey.

When Nintendo was suitably convinced it wasn’t dealing with a rogue Swedish operator (even though it… sort of was),
Bergsten ordered 250 samples of the first models of Game & Watch - and couldn’t shift them. “It was actually very, very
difficult to get it to sell,” he tells me. Part of that problem was how expensive a single game was in a market unused to
buying them at all, but it was also down to the product itself. The first run of Game & Watches might have entranced
Bergsten, but it wasn’t having the same effect on the general Swedish public.

That might have been the end of it, until a friend of Bergsten’s returned from a holiday to Hong Kong with a new model
as a souvenir. With a widescreen display, colour backgrounds and a classier gold casing, it made a far better first
impression. “When I saw that game...I really was so much more impressed than by the first ones, because it looks much
better.” It was enough to convince him he was on the right track: “I decided I had to go to Japan to meet this export
manager who [replied to my] telex.”

What followed feels more like a stage farce than a business success story. Ever the bullish salesman, Bergsten organised
to visit both Nintendo’s Tokyo export office, and its HQ in Kyoto. Because he wasn’t yet a wealthy man, he booked the
“very, very cheapest tickets”: he’d have a grand total of two days to visit two unfamiliar cities, he couldn’t change his
flight dates, and if anything went wrong he’d be speaking English, a second language to him, to people who might not
even speak it at all.

And then, the day before his flight, a McDonnell Douglas DC-10’s engine stopped working. It came just two years after a
fatal, engine-related related crash on another DC-10. Across the world, intact DC-10s were grounded for a day for checks
(which really doesn’t seem quite enough in retrospect). Guess what model of plane Bergsten was booked to fly on.

He was forced to stay a night at the airport, leaving him with a single day to cover both Japanese cities. It wasn’t
feasible, and he made the choice to head straight to Kyoto (“Every foreigner thinks that Tokyo is the centre of Japan, but
all [Nintendo’s] power was in Kyoto”). He arrived on a Thursday night, went to bed exhausted, and woke on Friday with
a plan to call Nintendo to let the team know what had happened, and when he’d arrive at HQ.

“I first called the Tokyo office, and there was some answering machine saying something, which I didn’t understand.
Then I called the Kyoto office, and there was another answering machine I didn’t understand. So I called my hotel
reception reception and asked, ‘Can you please call this number and tell me what they are saying?’”

The receptionist called back a minute later: “They’re saying that today is a national holiday in Japan, so everything is
closed.” He’d gone from two days to meet Nintendo, to one day, to none at all. Unless he tried something else, he would
have flown to Japan for nothing, and missed his chance to meet anyone from Nintendo.

He summoned up a tried-and-tested strategy - he told a little lie, and managed to persuade Japan Airlines to extend his
trip: “I persuaded [them] that this was an emergency and this was not my fault, and things like that.” It worked - again -
and he had the Monday to, in his words, “force my way into Kyoto”. After nearly missing the train that would actually
get him there (I told you this was a farce), he finally made it, with no real plan of what to do, other than just turn up and
ask for someone to talk to him.
Owe Bergsten tells me he has four rules for conducting conversations with Japanese businessmen, learned from a friend
before his trip to meet Nintendo, and still helpful today. They are as follows:

Always bring a gift. “It should not be a wooden thing or anything, it should be crystal glass. That is the only thing you
should buy.”
Don’t nag. “I mean in the western culture we can blah, blah, blah, blah, too many things. In Japanese culture you should
not ask for too much. The important things you should concentrate on to achieve them.”
Try to get them to invite you to lunch, “or even better, dinner, of course.”
You’ll never meet the right people, “because they have a wall of protection. You’ll meet someone on the periphery”.
You need to work to meet who you need to.

Bergsten had inadvertently bypassed number 4 already, simply by choosing an airline that employed planes with
occasionally terrifying engines, and heading straight to Kyoto HQ. He makes a point of telling me he used all of the other
rules in the course of negotiating his first major deal with Nintendo.

In what’s fast becoming clear is a typical Bergsten move, his first action was to just tell Nintendo’s export manager that
he was in town unannounced, and ask to come to the office. It worked, and the export manager’s interest was piqued
(“He said I was lucky. What could I do? I just had to”). Then came the negotiation. He didn’t remember rule number 2 -
don’t nag - right away. First, he asked for the distribution rights for Sweden. Then he asked for Scandinavia. Then he
asked for all of Europe. Remember, this was a man who owned an electronics shop business - he was just pretending to
own a major distribution network.

Then he remembered the rule. “I suddenly realised that this was not the way to do it, so I asked for Sweden and we
talked. We just talked.” They talked about a lot more than distribution rights. Bergsten explained Swedish history,
Swedish culture, he laid out his country as much like a tourism guide as it was an advert for his business. And he did it
with an ulterior motive: “I wanted the time to pass. And suddenly lunch time came.” Rule number 3. “He said, ‘Shall we
go for lunch?’ ‘Yes, of course,’ I said, ‘that would be fantastic.’”

Even better, lunch got abandoned in favour of a three-hour dinner. Well, dinner and drinks. “He drank a lot. I mean we
both drank a lot [...] so he was not 100% sober when he let me off at the hotel.” It laid the perfect groundwork for
the piece de resistance: rule number 1.

“I said, ‘I have a small gift for you. I would like to thank you very much for taking such good care of me.’” He handed the
export manager a package, which he opened immediately - a small crystal ashtray. “Then when we got out of the car, he
said to me, ‘Okay, you can have Sweden.’”

The white(ish) lies, the bullish approach to business, the rules, and, perhaps most of all, the alcohol, led to a decision
that altered the gaming business. But then, a kicker: “He said, ‘But remember the minimum order is 10,000 pieces.’”
Bergsala had found it hard to sell 250 Game & Watch units in the months previous, and that’s not even taking into
account the money involved: “10,000 pieces. That was the equivalent of €100,000 in orders - and that was a lot of
money at that time for a small radio shop dealer.”

Bergsten went home, had some “very, very tough negotiations” with the bank, and ordered 10,000 new Game &
Watches. And then, because he’s Owe Bergsten, he upped the order to 30,000. He never really tells me why.

Once again, the units shifted slowly, but Owe was convinced that hardware itself was no longer the problem. “When you
put it in the hands of a consumer,” he explains, “I mean you really understood how good it was. The problem was the
dealers, they were not interested. So they were the middle man who originally stopped the success.” Once he eventually
found a dealer who shared his belief - a small retailer that specialised in watches (soon to be Game & Watches) - the ball
began to roll, really rather quickly.

Christmas 1981, less than a year after his trip to Singapore, was when Bergsten’s approach finally paid dividends. But
rather than a holiday boom, it was just the start. Those 30,000 units sold out quickly. In the first three months of 1982,
Bergsten says the company sold 180,000 units. A month.

Bergsten and Nintendo each knew they were onto a winner. In June of ‘82, he returned to Japan, and Nintendo showed
him its new line of Multi Screen Game & Watches, which included a simplified version of Donkey Kong, the Miyamoto-
made coin-op that had exploded in arcades across the world at around the same time as Bergsten’s early successes. It
was clear how well this was going to do from the outset.

“We bought as many as we could,” he remembers with a smile. “We went around in Sweden showing this to big toy
dealers [...] It was the best sales trip I've ever been on, because everybody wanted it.” The demand was as
unmanageable as it was welcome: “In the Christmas of '82, if a customer ordered 100 units, they got one.”

As Bergsala’s success increased, so too did Bergsten’s friendship with Nintendo: “I went to Nintendo maybe three times
a year, or something like that. Every time we got a price reduction, maybe just 100 yen, or whatever, but every trip was
worthwhile.”

By early 1983, Bergsala had sold 1.7 million Game & Watches in Sweden. To get a measure of that success, bear in mind
quite how small Sweden is - in 1983, it was a country of around 8.3 million people. Bergsten breaks this down further for
me. Bergsala's target market was almost exclusively 7-12 year old boys. According to Swedish census data, there were
approximately 336,000 boys of that age at the time. "If you take that target group," says Bergsten, "you could say that
probably every kid had five games.” His calculation isn't wrong.

By comparison, Bergsten claims that Germany (61 million people in 1983) sold as much in a year as Sweden did in a
month. It’s not easy to check the validity of those figures - Nintendo doesn’t release them publicly, and didn’t respond to
me asking for them - but it’s very clear that Sweden massively overperformed. But then, in 1983, Game & Watch just
stopped selling in Sweden.

“Everybody ordered too much, and we ordered [too much] also. But it was very much over in March or April of '83, and
we had a huge stock [left over]. It was almost impossible to sell. The price of the double-screen was about €20 at that
time. [Retailers] tried to sell it for four or five, and still it was not so easy to sell.”

You might expect, at this point, for the story to switch from boom to bust - 1983 was the year of the Great Video Game
Crash, after all - but it didn’t work out like that. While Europe had been interested in Game & Watch but still relatively
ignorant of Nintendo as a whole, Bergsten suspected that the company behind his breakout success was going to be
useful for more than its LCD games. He kept in touch, despite the downturn, even kept paying to visit, despite he and
Nintendo having nothing to show one another. It was a worthwhile expense. “I think it was in August ’83, they showed
me the Famicom for the first time.”

Nintendo’s landmark home console had been released in Japan the month before, and was already a huge success.
Bergsten took home some sample units and a TV capable of displaying the foreign NTSC signal they outputted. He
became convinced that it would be another Game & Watch for him, inspired in part by the reaction of his staff: “All our
personnel came early in the morning, they didn't go for lunch, and they stayed late in the evening just to play, play,
play.”

He begged Nintendo to just release the Famicom in the west, but Nintendo said the flop of the Atari 2600 the year
before, and the resulting crash, meant it couldn’t be confident in a TV-based game product. History tells us that
Nintendo would recreate the Famicom as the Nintendo Entertainment System, releasing it in the US in 1985, and Europe
in 1986. It’s perhaps the biggest testament to just how much Owe Bergsten had impressed Nintendo that history almost
played out differently.

Bergsten kept visiting, kept begging. In 1984, Nintendo showed him an early version of Super Mario Bros. (“I'm sure I
was the first foreigner who saw it”), and he only begged more. “We were telling Nintendo, ‘we must have the TV game,
we must have the TV game.’" It got to the point where Nintendo, possibly just to shut him up, suddenly seemed to
change its mind.

Bergsten paraphrases the meeting he had; "’You are the only country in Europe that are interested”, he was told in
1985. “But we are prepared to make a special Famicom version for you.’" This would have been an identical design to
the Japanese Famicom, but with altered voltage, plugs and a PAL output.

This wasn’t idle talk; Bergsala put in an order between 5,000 and 10,000 units (Bergsten doesn’t quite remember - it
never happened after all), which was accepted. Later that year, as the US got its own new console, Nintendo changed its
mind. It wanted to create a specific European NES, tailored for a different market. In retrospect, Bergsten says it was the
correct decision - but it feels like only he could have almost forced Nintendo to make an incorrect one through sheer
force of charm.

NES, somewhat inevitably at this point, became a huge success for Bergsala, and more or less cemented the company as
a permanent partner for Nintendo. Bergsten became a part of the furniture. He says he was the first person outside of
Nintendo to play the Game Boy (“I went to the factory. It looked exactly the same, but there was a lot of cables and a big
computer in there, but you could hold it, and you could play it”), he played golf with the company’s board members, and
has always stayed in touch with that export manager he’d gotten drunk with all those years ago.

As Nintendo’s wealth and power grew, it expanded more confidently into the west. Nintendo of America - which had
opened in 1980 as a coin-op focused business - was transformed into a fully-fledged arm of the core business. Not long
after, it adopted one of Bergsala’s more unique business moves: “We started the Nintendo Club,” explains Bergsten,
“and they copied that.”

When NES launched in Europe, Bergsala had created a member’s club, Nintendo Videospelklubb, a way to connect the
kids looking forward to its games, inform them about upcoming releases and, inevitably, put pressure on stores to buy in
stock of games as those kids came in to ask when those same games would be available. Members were encouraged to
take stickers to retailers to guarantee purchases - a sort of proto pre-order - and Bergsala’s comic book-like brochures of
games are items of huge nostalgia to this day. It was an incredible success, an almost hilariously devious, corporate-
sponsored grassroots movement.

At its peak, 450,000 people were part of Bergsala’s Nintendo Club - around 5% of the entire Swedish population at the
time. Bergsten puts it bluntly: "There was a lot of power in that."

It’s no surprise that, after he had a golf meeting with Nintendo of America founder Minoru Arakawa, NoA’s Nintendo
Fun Club suddenly appeared, which was succeeded by the epochal Nintendo Power. Bergsten is too humble to say that
his company and its successes were an inspiration for Nintendo to expand into the west so suddenly and meaningfully,
but his Club is proof that Nintendo was very much paying attention.

Elsewhere, Bergsala’s influence is much easier to spot. Nintendo of Europe was founded in 1990, and began creating
country-specific businesses across the continent. Except in Scandinavia. It’s a mark of the esteem with which Bergsala’s
held that not only did Nintendo apparently turn down lucrative offers from other companies to run its Swedish
operation, it actively encouraged Bergsala to take over distribution across Scandinavia as a whole. In the early days,
Nintendo worked almost exclusively with third-party distributors for its western releases. Today, Bergsala is the only
non-Nintendo owned Nintendo distributor in the world.

In the context of that global operation, Bergsala doesn’t really have to deal directly with Nintendo Japan anymore, but
Bergsten calls his contacts there on their birthdays, and returns every year just to stay in touch. I like to think he still
turns up at the office unannounced, for old times’ sake. He tells me it’s a business tactic, but I feel like it’s something
closer to friendship. He may have told a lie to get Nintendo’s business, but the key was that it came out of love. He was a
fan of Nintendo from its very first handheld, and he remains so. Nintendo saw that love, and gave him loyalty in return.

Bergsten’s repaid that loyalty, and even paid it forward. In 2008, a disillusioned Brjann Sigurgeirsson, head of game-for-
hire developer Image & Form, saw a company called Bergsala in a local newspaper, which (incorrectly) listed it as a
publisher for Nintendo games. On a whim, he called the company’s head office, asking if it could start publishing his
games too - a move you might describe as ‘Bergstenian’. He went unnoticed for some time but, eventually, Bergsala got
in touch, going on to buy exactly half of Sigurgeirsson’s company. After some early negotiations about what it should
make, Bergsala told Image & Form to just make what it wanted, and it led to the much-loved and lauded SteamWorld
series. It found its initial home - where else? - on Nintendo’s consoles.

Sigurgeirsson went on to point Bergsten to another developer, Zoink! (most recently of Ghost Giant fame), and Bergsala
bought half of that company, too. The two developers recently formed their own publishing outfit, Thunderful, with
Bergsala owning half of that as well. Sigurgeirsson once asked why Bergsala always bought 50% of a company, rather
than an outright ownership of 51%. He recounts the reply: “If we bought 51% of your company, you’d have no say. You’d
feel like an idiot. And if we bought 49%, then we’d be the idiots - and you wouldn’t want to work with idiots, would
you?”

That mutual respect, the feeling that you’re working with an equal, even the winking humour - it all feels drawn directly
from those years of working with Nintendo, except now Bergsala is the big business helping the bullish little guys.

Bergsten didn’t just bring himself and others prosperity, but introduced a generation to Nintendo. Mikael Forslind, CEO
of indie developer Elden Pixels, grew up amidst Swedish Nintendo fever, even saying that his decision to get into gaming
“has pretty much everything to do with Bergsala”. His first exposure to the company’s work, besides buying the games
themselves, was through the Nintendo Videospelklubb magazine, and puts the effect of it simply: “Where I lived almost
everyone owned a Nintendo (well, except for that one weird kid who had a Sega).”

It went on to influence Forslind throughout his life, to the point where he applied for a job at Bergsala, designing his
resume to look identical to the Nintendo Club magazines he grew up with. He didn’t get the job - “apparently you need
some kind of education to work with sales and marketing” - so he returned to school and redoubled his efforts to break
into the industry he loved so much. Several years later, after stops at other developers, he’s leading a company, making
his own games - for Switch, of course.

There are more who could tell similar stories, and even more than that who could tell similar stories without realising
that it’s Owe Bergsten at the root of it all. It’s mind-boggling to think of the magnitude at which that one little lie in 1981
has had a positive effect - a butterfly flapping wings made of telex paper. Eventually, and inevitably, that flap hit me too.

Back in 2017, when I finished conducting this interview, I said my goodbyes to Owe and headed to Gothenburg airport.
While I waited for my flight, I started working on a preview I’d been putting off writing - it was for Super Mario Odyssey.
As I wrote, I got enthused, got lost in the moment and, when I looked up again, I’d missed my flight home.

After I stopped screaming, it popped into my head just how neat a coincidence it was that I’d been writing about a game
Bergsala would be selling in just a few months. And then I started thinking about how that game could be traced back
through the years, the number of decisions made just half an hour down the road that could conceivably have led to a
point where there wasn’t a Super Mario Odyssey to write about. If Bergsala hadn’t set the precedent, would the
Nintendo of Europe office where I saw the game exist? If the NES release date had changed, would it have been hit by
the video game crash, and changed how Nintendo makes consoles? Hell, I started my career at Official Nintendo
Magazine, itself a reflection of those Nintendo Club brochures - would I be writing at all without them? If Bergsten
hadn’t told that little lie, would any of this be the same? None of it is certain, and it hinges on the man who sent that
telex.

And then I snapped back to reality. I still had to get a plane home. I decided to nab a technique from the man I’d just
spent an afternoon talking to. I queued for the airline check-in desk, and when I got to the front I told them I had to get
home today, it was an emergency, that they should change my ticket for free. If he could do it back in 1981 and build a
mutually beneficial business empire on the back of it, I could manage it for a budget flight to Luton Airport. Of course it
didn’t work. I’m no Owe Bergsten.

Everything you need to know about the Theranos scandal

Everything you need to know about Elizabth Holmes and the Theranos scandal.

The Theranos scandal has dominated headlines, and in equal measure fascinated and appalled readers worldwide
since John Carreyrou’s shattering report first broke in 2015. Read on for the full story of the Theranos scandal to date
and what is set to unravel next.

In 2014, Theranos, a blood-testing startup pitching a supposedly revolutionary technology, was flying high. While
existing technology required one vial of blood for each diagnostic test conducted upon it, Theranos claimed to be able to
perform hundreds of tests (supposedly over 240) ranging from cholesterol levels to complex genetic analysis, with just a
single pinprick of blood. Automated, fast and inexpensive, Theranos seemed to be offering technology that could
revolutionize medicine and save lives the world over.

Elizabeth Holmes, founder and CEO of Theranos, had famously dropped out of Stanford to found the company using her
tuition money, and was just 30 when Theranos was at its peak. Having raised over $700m in investment from the likes of
Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, the company had become the rising star of Silicon Valley and was valued at over $9 billion,
while Holmes, with a share of more than half that, was heralded as the female Steve Jobs.

The only problem? The technology didn’t work.

It was John Carreyrou, twice-Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist of the Wall Street Journal who first broke the story in 2015.
Having received a tip doubting the performance of the Theranos technology, John’s interest was triggered further by
Holmes’ purported ability to invent ground-breaking medical technology after just two semesters of chemical
engineering classes at Stanford . . .

Despite intimidation and threats of legal action, former Theranos employees Erika Cheung and Tyler Schultz, whose
Grandfather George Schultz was a member of the Theranos board, began sharing their experiences of the company, its
technology and practices with John. They revealed lies to board members, a culture of intimidation and secrecy,
technology that repeatedly failed quality assurance and crucially, results sent to real patients that were fundamentally
incorrect, upon which life-changing medical decisions were being made. It would seem that the company had been built
on nothing more than audacious lies.

Thanks in large part to the information from Theranos whistleblowers, John was able to publish his report in the WSJ,
revealing that Theranos was not using its own technology to run the majority of its tests due to the inefficiency of its
own technology. FDA investigations ensued and all that was written in John’s report was proven correct.

The reaction from Theranos was astonishing. At first, Holmes vehemently denied the claims made against her and the
company. Theranos even threatened to sue John himself who became a perceived enemy to the company, with some
Theranos employees even chanting ‘Fuck you Carreyrou’.
Nonetheless, in 2018, Holmes stepped down as CEO and, alongside former company president Ramesh Balwani, was
charged with criminal fraud, having allegedly misled investors and deliberately made false claims made about the
efficiency of the company’s blood testing technology.

Three months later the company officially shut down following investigation by the FBI, leaving thousands of former
employees, many of whom John found to be talented people with integrity, unaware of the company’s fraudulent
activity, uncertain about their future.

Today Holmes, 31, remains disgraced and is currently awaiting trial facing up to 20 years in prison.

In his award-winning book, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, John delves deeper into the
truth of the Theranos scandal and the experience of his investigation. Meanwhile, the media continues its fascination
with the company and its founder, with stories ranging from those challenging the authenticity of Holmes’ famous
baritone voice, to podcast The Dropout dedicated to the rise and fall of the Theranos empire.

The scandal is also set to come to screens, with The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley; a documentary
produced and directed by the oscar-winning Alex Gibney, set to air on HBO on March 31st 2019. What’s more, a feature
film is in development and currently slated for release next year. Adam McKay (The Big Short) is attached to direct;
Jennifer Lawrence confirmed to star as Holmes and Vanessa Taylor (The Shape of Water) to write the screenplay.