In 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.
Source: IGN.com The Lie That Helped Build Nintendo