Yamauchi dies at 85

[Flam]

Sad day in the world of Nintendo

[DK1105]

I found out heading back from a garage sale where I just missed out a huge snes game lot for almost nothing. I had NPR on and they had a short story on it.

[Satoshi_Matrix]

It's always sad when anyone dies, but all that I recall reading about him was largely negative for some reason.

[Emperor Megas]

Who's Yamauchi?

[T2KFreeker]

Who's Yamauchi?

Hiroshi Yamauchi is the guy that changed Nintendo from a playing card company to the Video Game company they are now. The guy was President of Nintendo for 50 years, give or take. Without him, Nintendo may well have never been the success it is now. Not always the most nice of guys to deal with, so I have read, the guy was a business genius though making Nintendo a huge, world known brand. For that, he's the man. R.I.P. Yamauchi-san.

[TheRetroVideoGameAddict]

He was a true visionary for the company and for the industry as a whole, the medium has a giant hole now due to his passing. I know those who knew him well and those at Nintendo are mourning his death on this day, but I believe that so many of us are doing the same as fans of Nintendo and of great innovation.

R.I.P Hiroyoshi.

[Greg2600]

It's always sad when anyone dies, but all that I recall reading about him was largely negative for some reason.

He was very old fashioned, described as managing with an imperial style, often firing long time employees. Regardless, he built Nintendo for decades as the final say in what should/should not be released. I'd say he had a pretty good track record.

[Flam]

Anyone who has not read 'Game Over' needs to do so immediately

[The Adventurer]

Anyone who has not read 'Game Over' needs to do so immediately

I read that once. I think the most interesting thing about Yamauchi was his complete non-affinity with video games. Once they put a controller in his hand to play a NES version of Go (Othello, right?) and having no idea what to do.

[Gameguy]

I read that once. I think the most interesting thing about Yamauchi was his complete non-affinity with video games. Once they put a controller in his hand to play a NES version of Go (Othello, right?) and having no idea what to do.

Go and Othello are completly different games, Othello is way easier. Othello is often known as Reversi for some reason, that's the only alternate title I know of.

[goob47]

Just curious, but you said Yamauchi was the guy who converted them from a playing card company to a video game company? Weren't they also involved with love hotels? What ever happened to that?

[Akito01]

The short answer is that they experimented with a number of different enterprises in the 60s, but they all lost money. It wasn't until they started producing toys, beginning with the Ultra Hand and expanding into more electronic toys, that they started to truly expand beyond their core playing card business.

Really good read on USGamer about how he transformed Nintendo.

Just curious, but you said Yamauchi was the guy who converted them from a playing card company to a video game company? Weren't they also involved with love hotels? What ever happened to that?

[treismac]

Can't help but wonder where the video game industry would be if not for the titans like Yamauchi and Bushnell. At times I kind of take the whole concept of video games for granted as if, like the wheel, they would have had to be embraced by the world eventually, but who knows. Without Yamauchi perhaps we'd all be talking on a forum about the passing of some great board game creator right now.

Rest in peace and thanks.

[Satoshi_Matrix]

Here's some copypasta for those wishing to learn more about the visionary man who sadly has just passed.

In 1956 a Japanese businessman visited America, a land he knew well having attended University there, to pay a visit to the world leader in his company’s field. The company he visited is still in business today and is called the United States Playing Card Company. The Japanese businessman saw the world leader in playing cards running out of a tiny office and saw the limitations his industry had, deciding his company needed to branch out.

They tried hotels, rice, a taxi company and even a T.V network before producing popular toys, but struggled to compete with well established giants of the industry. This success convinced the businessman that family entertainment could be a good business and in 1973 his company set up family entertainment venues, with laser clay pigeon shooting in abandoned bowling alleys. This success spawned yet more light gun machines for the emerging arcade scene, with the venues going into decline.

A year later, the company secured the rights to distribute the Magnavox Odyssey, the very first home video game console, in Japan and its popularity convinced the businessman that his company should enter this market. In 1977 they made the Color TV Game, featuring multiple versions of the same game.

Two years earlier they had entered the arcade video games market with EVR Race, and continued releasing arcade games with some success until 1980 and the release of the Game & Watch to worldwide acclaim. The following year they struck it big with an arcade game called Donkey Kong, licensing the game to be ported to home consoles such as Atari’s 2600, Intellivision and ColecoVision, hugely boosting the companies profits.

By 1983 a number of companies had seen the successes the emerging games industry had created and decided to enter it themselves, bloating the home console market to 13 different home consoles, with another 2 announced that year. Each had their own libraries, most of which weren’t very good, with more crap games being churned out in a matter of weeks by new start up companies eager to tap into the lucrative market. That lucrative market however, was ever fragile and at breaking point. The final straw came when high profile titles were released to a universal panning. The first was a port of highly addictive and hugely popular arcade smash hit Pac-Man, which is basically nothing like the arcade version. The second is fairly commonly accepted as the worst game of all time, a movie tie in that set the still well known precedent of movie tie ins, a game based on Steven Spielberg’s box office hit E.T the Extra-Terrestrial. Hyped by Spielberg who frequently took to press talking of how excited he was that fans would be able to play his movie.

"Howard [Warshaw], who is a certifiable genius went off about a number of weeks later came back with a concept and a gameplan. I saw the gameplan, a very rough scheme of the game and I was amazed at how difficult it was and yet at the same time how much fun it was to play." Steven Spielberg

Spielberg’s home and office were both filled with arcade game machines in 1982, he was, and is, one of us, a gamer, but there is no way that anyone should ever see the phrase “how much fun it was to play” when describing the game that Atari sold 1.5 millions copies of, after they had made 5 million copies, spawning the popular urban myth that Atari had the remaining copies, along with 5 million unsold copies of Pac-Man as well as unsold hardware, crushed and buried in a landfill before covering it over with concrete.

The industry entered a recession the likes of which it hadn’t seen and from which it was not expected to recover. The dream was dead.

But our Japanese businessman had released a home console in 1983 too, but he believed it was capable of more success than it was getting from its solely Japanese market and in 1985 he decided to release it in the north American market. The console was a champion, a hero not only to wrestle back the industry that seemed crushed and buried in a landfill with millions of copies of unsold games, but steered the home console industry to a never before seen golden age.

The Nintendo Entertainment System then saw a release in Europe in 1986 and then Australian in 1987. Many companies were irreconcilably damaged at best, but most involved were utterly destroyed and the purge created a new standard of quality.

The Japanese businessmen oversaw smash hit after smash hit as his company, Nintendo, conquered the world with a string of successful console releases, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System gave us unparralleled graphics and great games like Super Mario Kart, while the Game Boy created a legacy of handheld domination Nintendo hold onto to this day. The release of Nintendo 64 marked the beginning of a downward trend for Nintendo’s home console market, which it had lead for over a decade. The console lost the generations console war to newcomer Sony, who had ironically been working with Nintendo to create a home console together before the relationship soured, but the N64 enjoys a loyal fanbase even today with titles like Goldeneye, Turok and Super Mario 64.

Then came the GameCube, a console our Japanese businessman was keen to promote as a dedicated gaming device, a different approach from rivals Sega, Sony and newcomer Microsoft, who were keen to show that there consoles did more than play games, they played DVDs, music and accessed the internet, the GameCube would be a console for gamers, and it would be significantly cheaper than its rivals. “As cheap as possible” he said.

By this time however his age had caught up with him and he decided to step down as president, instead serving as the chairmen of Nintendo’s board of directors for a further 3 years, before retiring.

Clearly, the company his grandfather had started meant a great deal to our Japanese businesman. Nintendo offered him a pension, which he was obviously fully entitled to, having ran the company for more than 50 years, reported to be around between £5.5 to £8.5 million, but he refused, saying he felt the company could find a better use of for the money. He also donated money to help build a new cancer treatment centre in Kyoto.

It wasn’t all roses. The Virtual Boy released in 1995 struggled heavily, despite his assertion that he believed in the console and committed the company to making more games for it. Upon his leaving Nintendo he retained ownership of 10% of the companies shares and it is estimated that that ownership lost him £195 million when the stock plunged following the announcement of Nintendo’s Wii U console and the price drop for it’s 3DS handheld system.

Nintendo was founded by the businessman’s grandfather, whom he succeeded at Nintendo after he died in 1949 and it is around this time that he was contacted to discover his father had died. His father had abandoned the businessman and his mother in his youth and after returning years later to see his son, the businessman refused to speak to him. At his funeral the businessman met his father’s wife and his four half-sisters, whom he had never known had existed. He began to feel incredibly guilty that he had not reconciled with his father and grieved for a long time.

Today, however our Japanese businessman died, of complications from pneumonia. He was 85 and is survived by his wife and four children.

He was a complex man, a shrewd businessman who built an empire but at the same time raised a family, but most of all Hiroshi Yamauchi was a visionary, without whom, make no mistake, none of this would be possible. He will be missed. Rest in peace.



Hiroshi Yamauchi 7th November 1927 - 19th September 2013

[Flam]

Can't help but wonder where the video game industry would be if not for the titans like Yamauchi and Bushnell. At times I kind of take the whole concept of video games for granted as if, like the wheel, they would have had to be embraced by the world eventually, but who knows. Without Yamauchi perhaps we'd all be talking on a forum about the passing of some great board game creator right now.

Rest in peace and thanks.

I think the industry would be here, but what form it would have taken is unknown. I think it's difficult for younger generations to really appreciate how large a pop culture phenomenon the NES was. It was like an explosion into the psyche of American kids.

Come to think of it, is there really such thing as a "pop culture" anymore? I realize pop culture is relative and will continue to exist as there are popular things within a culture. However, what do younger kids these days have to themselves? Seems that everything in pop culture today is bland and generic. Anyway I'm rambling at this point.

[The Adventurer]

I think the industry would be here, but what form it would have taken is unknown. I think it's difficult for younger generations to really appreciate how large a pop culture phenomenon the NES was. It was like an explosion into the psyche of American kids.

Come to think of it, is there really such thing as a "pop culture" anymore? I realize pop culture is relative and will continue to exist as there are popular things within a culture. However, what do younger kids these days have to themselves? Seems that everything in pop culture today is bland and generic. Anyway I'm rambling at this point.

The latest fads always seem obscure and alien to the older generation. Believe me, kids still have their pop culture.

[InsaneDavid]

Can't help but wonder where the video game industry would be if not for the titans like Yamauchi and Bushnell.

You mean Yokoi and Baer.

[Tupin]

You mean Yokoi and Baer.

Every Wozniak needs a Jobs, if you get what I'm saying.

[Tenjikuronin]

I wonder what this means for the Seattle Mariners...

[InsaneDavid]

Every Wozniak needs a Jobs, if you get what I'm saying.

I understand that. I've always felt that if it wasn't for Yokoi, Yamauchi would have stumbled from one unsuccessful endeavor to the next and Nintendo would have remained a jack of all trades but master of none company. Nearly everything that turned Nintendo's fortunes around sprung from the hands and mind of Gunpei Yokoi. Affordable, easy to manufacture, simple and fun was Yokoi's creed and it was that thinking that would lead Nintendo to its greatest era of prosperity.