This is a fun bit of gaming history:

The thing about games, particularly Japanese games, is that they exist in a symbiotic relationship with manga and anime. When I spoke to Uemura-san, the engineer of the NES, he said ‘Once hardware developed to the point where you could actually draw characters, designers had to figure out what to make. Subconsciously they turned to things they’d absorbed from anime and manga. We were sort of blessed in the sense that foreigners hadn’t seen the things we were basing our ideas on.’