Nintendo visionary Hiroshi Yamauchi dies aged 85

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24160150

by T-zex • 13 years ago

433 63 13 years ago

bbc.co.uk

RIP. You touched many lives, many childhoods were brightened by your game-and-watches, your chimneys inhabited by man-eating plants, your moustached italian plumber heroes. I hope to inspire 1/1,000,000 as many people.

edit: here are some Nintendo Game and Watch devices on eBay for all you young runts. http://www.ebay.com/sch/Vintage-Pre1990-/155342/i.html?_from...

netcan• 13 years ago

It was always having the Japanese in the periphery of my pop culture, contributing from a parallel world. They very obviously were (are) building on top of different tradition of art and storytelling.

Where I grew up a dubbed 70s manga cartoon (also about a little Italian) was one of only a handful of kids shows we got on our single TV channel.

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contingencies• 13 years ago

On the different tradition of art and storytelling meme, a really cool exhibition just finished at the Rotterdam Wereldmuseum in Holland showing the evolution of Japanese manga from early Buddhist deities and Edo period printmaking. The book is 25EUR: http://wereldmuseumwinkel.com/pages/2/webshop.html?categoryI...

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k-mcgrady• 13 years ago

The N64 was the first proper games console I owned (I got it as a gift when I was 7). I spent so much time on it and had a lot of fun (I even brought it on holiday with me :). I still love to dig it out of the attic every now and then. Even though I'm not 'a gamer' it holds a lot of happy memories for me. RIP.

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robotmay2• 13 years ago

My mum won our N64 in a toilet paper competition, which was great because we wouldn't have been able to afford it otherwise. My brother and I spent so much time together playing on it and I don't think I've ever enjoyed games quite as much as I did at that time.

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circuiter• 13 years ago

My mum won our N64 in a toilet paper competition,

What?

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jimmaswell• 13 years ago

What kind of toilet paper competition?

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sspiff2• 13 years ago

Don't you feel a little sad when you vaguely remember those days? I'm only 26 but my memories about those "golden days" are becoming harder and harder to find.

I got an N64 at the age of 10 when my brother and I got "good grades for an entire year" in primary school. It was my first console (and we didn't have a computer).

I started claiming I wanted to make videogames around the age of 7, so it was almost like a defining moment in my life :) I have a lot of great memories with that thing, and still think the controller design (though not the build) is the best of any console ever.

After we got the N64, we suddenly had many more friends who wanted to come over and play! I evangelized the N64 and eventually there were 4 of us who got one, so we could swap tons of games. (Game acquisition for kids in those days was hard!)

Been a huge Nintendo fan ever since. My N64 is still hooked up to the TV.

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mathgeek• 13 years ago

Don't you feel a little sad when you vaguely remember those days? I'm only 26 but my memories about those "golden days" are becoming harder and harder to find.

Creating those kinds of moments for your kids is even better than experiencing them as a kid yourself (for me, anyway).

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tinco2• 13 years ago

R.I.P, I idolized this man as a child, being a fervent subscriber to Nintendo propaganda magazines.

Nowadays my opinion of him is more nuanced. Like Steve Jobs, he built these perfect products by being an absolutely ruthless business man.

The way he treated Nintendo business partners makes the Apple app store look like kinder garten. How many game developers and studios must be cursing his grave?

Yet from his iron shelve management strategies and business practices sprouted a range of exquisite products that every young adult remembers with tremendous fondness and respect. He truly was putting consumer experience over everything else.

I think that's what we should thank him for :)

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sillysaurus22• 13 years ago

That's very interesting. I know nothing about him, but I'm very intrigued to hear more about his ruthless business practices.

Nowadays there's less stigma attached to the idea of being a ruthless businessman. In fact, it's often considered meritous. So I don't think it would be disrespectful to highlight some of the things he's done. After all, it's a testament to what it took to build a company of the caliber of Nintendo.

What sort of strategies did he employ?

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tinco2• 13 years ago

Well for example the shelve management of the cartride game systems. If you would want to produce a game for the SNES, to actually distribute it you would have to put it on a cartridge and sell it.

But the design and specifications of these cartridges was protected by Nintendo, so the only way to distribute a game was to ask Nintendo for cartridges. Because Nintendo would only allow quality games on its shelves, it would test your game before allowing you any cartridges, so your game basically had to be nearly finished before you could ask Nintendo for cartridges. Of course if you were refused at this point you would have already invested tons of money so it would be pretty ruinous.

Besides the go/no-go signal, Nintendo also controlled the _amount_ of cartridges you would get. If Nintendo decided (much like Apple did in recent years) that your game was more valuable if it had limited copies, then you wouldn't get many copies, regardless if that would leave you with not enough revenue to make a profit.

Reasons for refusal of cartridges were both fair and rather unfair. For example you could be refused for lack of quality, but you could also be refused because another game in your genre already had shelve space and they didn't want to endanger its dominance. Basically you were at the complete mercy of how Nintendo wanted to make maximum profit for it self.

I have heard, though I don't know for sure (maybe someone could check it :P) that Atari eventually went bankrupt because it decided to make a Nintendo game (as a last resort perhaps), got into a conflict with Nintendo, sued them, and lost..

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throwawaichi• 13 years ago

It's fake, but a few years ago there was a story about a meeting between him and Steve Ballmer. Google for "HEY, BALLMER, WHY DON'T YOU SUCK MY TINY YELLOW BALLS?"

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magoghm• 13 years ago

There is a very good description in this book: "Game Over: How Nintendo Conquered The World" http://www.amazon.com/Game-Over-Nintendo-Conquered-World/dp/...

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jader201• 13 years ago

There's an ars technica article [1] that dives deep into the early industry of video games and how Nintendo held such a tight -- almost monopolistic -- rein over its third parties. A very good read, and I found it very interesting how Nintendo did things then that there's no way would work in today's business.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/07/time-to-feel-old-insid...

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MattPearce2• 13 years ago

As a developer (and one who has worked with Nintendo as a third party), I have nothing but respect for the man.

You are right in comparing him to Jobs:

" In 1986, Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi noted that "Atari collapsed because they gave too much freedom to third-party developers and the market was swamped with rubbish games." In response, Nintendo limited the number of titles that third-party developers could release for their system each year, and promoted its "Seal of Quality", which it allowed to be used on games and peripherals by publishers that met Nintendo's quality standards." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_video_game_crash...

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johnchristopher• 13 years ago

As a child I used to wonder about that "Seal of Quality" because it was on every Nintendo game you could find. Every game had this seal.

Either it was a Nintendo gimmick or the market didn't offer games that didn't have the seal.

edit: lost myself in a double negation

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Jach• 13 years ago

What Nintendo platform did you develop for? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshi_Yamauchi#Nintendo_64

"Yamauchi admitted at the 2001 Nintendo Space World event that he had intentionally ordered the Nintendo 64 to be difficult to program games for. The idea was to repel untalented third-party developers from the console, and hence tighten the quality of third-party games. However, his plan backfired and merely increased the number of poorly developed games for the console. As a result of this, the Nintendo Gamecube was to take a step in the other direction, and provide an easy, smooth and intuitive programming environment for game developers.[6][9]"

It would have been interesting to see Yamauchi-san carry on through the Wii and Wii U/3DS eras -- what would he have done differently than Iwata? (On a side-note about the Crash, E.T. gets shit on a lot when it's arguably not so bad a game and ahead of its time in many respects: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NgL5H2RdI4 with fixes for common complaints: http://www.neocomputer.org)/projects/et/)

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du• 13 years ago

On a related note: Yamauchi was 55 when the NES was released and he retired some time after the Gamecube at 74. Steve died at 56, makes one wonder what else he could've given us.

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sillysaurus22• 13 years ago

Especially if he hadn't ignored his doctors with homeopathy! Every time I think about it, I wonder how anyone could fall victim to such things. Imagine Steve Jobs being thrown into prison for 20 years. Homeopathy was just as horrific, because it gave him an excuse to ignore his doctors and allow the cancer to fester.

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mkr-hn• 13 years ago

I have a closet that's about 10% filled with games and systems created by his company.

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linux_devil• 13 years ago

R.I.P Thanks for creating our childhood a thoughtful and amazing paradise.

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nness• 13 years ago

Leave Luck To Heaven.

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dpapathanasiou4• 13 years ago

For those who don't get it, that's the loose way of translating the three characters[1] which make up the name "Nintendo" in Japanese, though you wouldn't necessarily know it by looking them up one by one[2].

[1] 任天堂

[2] http://tangorin.com/general/%E4%BB%BB%E5%A4%A9%E5%A0%82

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ekianjo3• 13 years ago

You would not even translate it this way. :P You dont just stitch meaning to kanji like that in Japanese :P

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w1ntermute2• 13 years ago

「運」という意味がその３つのどの漢字にも入ってないよ。

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Keyframe• 13 years ago

RIP. Honestly, I thought he was older. Read, if you haven't Game Over http://www.amazon.com/Game-Over-Nintendo-Conquered-World/dp/... It is, essentially, a great book (unlike boo.com) about a startup called Nintendo. You wont regret the read, even if you're not into games.

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ekianjo3• 13 years ago

Not sure if what i heard is true but i have been told that he had never played games himself.

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kyllo• 13 years ago

RIP. Hiroshi Yamauchi was also the majority owner of the Seattle Mariners baseball club, and is responsible for keeping the team in Seattle in the late 90s when there was a very high chance of it being sold off to another city. He never attended a Mariners game, and didn't even like baseball, but purchased it as a way of saying "thank you" to Seattle for its support of Nintendo (Nintendo of America is headquartered in Redmond, just a few miles from Microsoft).

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the_watcher• 13 years ago

Without him, the Mariners would be in Tampa, and we may have never gotten to enjoy the wonders of Ichiro, or the incredible 2001 season (not to mention that he was the first owner willing to take the plunge on Japanese position players). Seattle fans who forget this, imagine if someone like him had been around to save the Sonics.

RIP.

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dubfan• 13 years ago

Nintendo of America isn't even "just a few miles" from Microsoft. It's almost completely surrounded by the Microsoft campus.

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apa-sl• 13 years ago

I started to love Nintendo when I've got my GameBoy. I remember crying out loud in Geneva when my mother refused to buy me GameBoy color with Earthworm Jim :-)

Renting out N64 with my friend and playing it as much as we could through 1 month. I'm still a fan of Nintendo, this year bought Wii U and having fun with it. RIP

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redcrusher• 13 years ago

RIP! you were a great visionary! and one everyone will miss

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kenshiro_o• 13 years ago

RIP. A great man from the entertainment industry. I hope Nintendo come up with a great and powerful console after the Wii U generation.

Nintendo visionary Hiroshi Yamauchi dies aged 85

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