Leave Luck to Heaven

Leave Luck to Heaven won the Grand Prize in the 6th season of the Filmmatic Pitch Now! competition in 2024, and in the following two years picked up the Bronze Prize in Best Historical Screenplay in the PAGE International Screenwriting Awards and the Category Winner for Best Historical/Period Screenplay in Final Draft’s Big Break Screenwriting Competition.

The story follows the exploits of Nintendo of America’s earliest years, switching perspectives between Minoru and Yoko Arakawa in the United States and Hiroshi Yamauchi, Shigeru Miyamoto, and Gunpei Yokoi in Japan throughout the early 1980’s as Nintendo attempted to gain a foothold in the burgeoning video game business.

My goal with the screenplay wasn’t just to tell the story of Nintendo’s ascent to a household name—that approach always seemed too clinical, and also could never truly capture what made Nintendo special. The reason Nintendo succeeded wasn’t just because it made smart business decisions or made great technology, but because it saw games as something beyond the business and technology that had previously defined them.

As a game developer and storyteller with nearly 20 years of experience, I know how powerful games can be as a medium—but many people still do not. And in 1981, the idea that somebody might try to tell a love story in a video game like Donkey Kong was nigh unfathomable to creators and customers alike. I wanted to capture that—the nascent concept of taking a new medium and showing how a small group of extremely talented people across business, design, and technology, wielding philosophies from both the USA and Japan, worked together to create something that would go on to capture the hearts and minds of the entire world.