Nathaniel
| Nathaniel | |
|---|---|
| |
| Species | Human |
| First appearance | Nathaniel's Fun Factory (1999) |
- “Please let there be fun... please let there be fun...”
- —Nathaniel, Nathaniel's Fun Factory
Nathaniel is a character in and the protagonist of the self-titled pamphlet Nathaniel's Fun Factory, an eight-page storybook available for download as a .PDF file from the official Nintendo Annual Report website in 1999. He is a young man with brown hair and blue-gray eyes.
Nathaniel lives in a large house in the desert with his mother, which causes him to become very bored. He is an only child, and all of his friends live far away from him, so he feels that he does not ever have any fun. He does not particularly enjoy his mother's attempts to fix this, as they all involve listening to someone else's story, when Nathaniel wishes to create his own.
One night, Nathaniel dreams of a machine that would turn all of the world's boredom into fun, which resembles a castle that is populated with various Nintendo characters, including some of those from the Super Mario franchise. The next day, he builds the machine using his dream as a reference point and dubs it his "Fun Factory."
From that point forward, Nathaniel's dreams heavily involve Nintendo characters. The first night after building his Fun Factory, he dreams of Donkey Kong leading him to "wondrous places." He starts having friends over, and their dreams also end up being influenced by his Fun Factory. As Nathaniel grows older, his tastes do change, though the Fun Factory continues to adapt to his changing interests.
Eventually, Nathaniel decides that he has outgrown his Fun Factory and places it in a closet. After Nathaniel becomes a father, he, his wife, and his daughter move to a city. His daughter ends up very sad one night, as Nathaniel once was, so he digs into the back of his closet and gives his Fun Factory to her.
Later that night, after his daughter is asleep, Nathaniel finds that he is unable to drift off himself. He then goes back to his daughter's room and borrows the Fun Factory, which provides him with yet another dream, this being riding on a winged fish.
