Hiroshi Yamauchi, the president of Nintendo from 1949 to
2002, has died at the age of 85. In a short statement released to the press
today, the company wrote, "Nintendo is in mourning today from the sad loss
of the former Nintendo president Mr Hiroshi Yamauchi, who sadly passed away
this morning."
Yamauchi, who took over as president after his grandfather
suffered a stroke, transformed Nintendo from a little-known manufacturer of
playing cards into the most powerful force in the global video game industry.
It was Yamauchi who spotted talented engineer Gunpei Yokoi at one of the
company's factories – Yokoi-san had built a robotic arm for his own amusement,
but Yamauchi saw its potential as a product, ordered its manufacture and so
kickstarted Nintendo's expansion into the toy and gadget market. Yokoi would go
on to invent the hugely successful Game Boy handheld console.
Noticing the boom in the video game market, Yamauchi later
tasked young artist Shigeru Miyamoto with creating an arcade machine that could
attract the growing global audience. The result was Donkey Kong, a massive
success in its own right, and the origin of the legendary Mario character.
The long-standing president would go on to oversee the company's
entry into the home console market, which it soon utterly dominated with the
Famicom and Super Famicom consoles released in the eighties and early nineties.
At its height, Nintendo enjoyed a 90% share of the console hardware sector.
Importantly, in the wake of the video game crash in 1983, where a glut of
mediocre third-party releases for consoles such as the Atari VCS effectively
devalued the whole industry, Yamauchi oversaw the introduction of Nintendo's
"Seal of Quality" programme, which restricted the numbers of
developers that could release games on its systems.
Although Yamauchi stepped down in 2002 to be replaced by current
president Satoru Iwata, he remained a major shareholder and retained an
advisory role at Nintendo.
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