Earlier this morning, former Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi passed away in Japan from pneumonia. He was 85.

Hiroshi was the cause of Nintendo's current success, with help from Shigeru Miyamoto, bringing Nintendo away from its main venture in playing cards and into video games. Inheriting the business in the 1950's from his father and ousting his brother, he became the president of Nintendo, which at that time was nothing but a playing card company. Playing cards were becoming less and less popular however, so looking for something else to profit from, he decided to get into the video game market, namely the growing american arcade market. He consulted his head designer at the time, Shigeru Miyamoto, to develop a new game. He showed Hiroshi his pet project Donkey Kong, and he loved it, so it was released and it became the hit it was and still is.

Since this was still the early days of consumer electronics, Yamauchi realized that since prices were going down and people really enjoyed the Atari and Magnavox consoles, releasing their own console would be a pretty good idea.
And it was.
Soon came the Famicom, later released in the US and worldwide as the Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES. Millions were sold, and since Nintendo was still a small company, Yamauchi could run it how he wanted. He made three seperate R/D departments to have them compete to have their games selected by Hiroshi to be released, as he had the only say on which games were released.

He was still the president through the release of the Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64 and GameCube, and even the acquisition of the Seattle Mariners baseball team, eventually stepping down from president in 2002, and leaving the company in 2005. He had a net worth of $2.1 million at his death.


"The gaming wars, they will never end,” he said, adding: “That’s just not how this business works. Nobody knows what tomorrow will bring.”
-Hiroshi Yamauchi