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Nvidia’s CEO and co-founder, Jensen Huang, has shared an interesting story of Nvidia’s early days in the mid-nineties. The company developed the very first GPU more than 25 years ago, and since then, has remained a mainstay in the computing industry. Nvidia still enjoys more than 90% of GPU market share, just as Intel finally hit 1%, and there’s no real sign of that altering soon.
Before it’s major success, the start-up company’s first big deal was struck with Japanese games giant Sega, but not everything immediately went plan, and some goodwill from the Sega’s president at the time, Shoichiro Irimajiri, kept the company alive. Huang shared the story during his recent appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast.
Nvidia’s first major contract was with Sega, to develop a chip for its new console
The story revolves around the inspiration to bring 3D to PC gaming following the introduction of 3D games on arcade machines. Huang points to Sega’s Yu Suzuki as the person that “pioneered 3D graphics gaming,” and decided Nvidia should partner with Sega to make it a reality on your personal computer, too – noting “that’s how Nvidia started”.
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“We would go to work in this townhouse, but when you’re a start-up, and the mission statement is the way we described, you’re not going to have too many customers calling you. And so we really had nothing to do. And so, after lunch we would go to the arcades and play Sega Virtua Fighter and Daytona and all those games and analyze how they’re doing it – try to figure out how they were doing that. And so, we decided, let’s just go to Japan. Let’s convince Sega to move those applications into the PC.”
Nvidia CEO and co-founder, Jensen Huang
The Nvidia CEO also recalled this story almost a year ago, when celebrating the 30th anniversary of one of Sega’s early 3D arcade hits, fighting game Virtua Fighter. In the video, he notes that the small Nvidia team at the time spent “countless hours at our local arcades playing Virtua Fighter”.
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