
Nintendo visionary Hiroshi Yamauchi dies aged 85 - T-zex
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24160150
======
tinco
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 :)

~~~
sillysaurus2
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?

~~~
tinco
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..

~~~
DanielleMolloy
I disagree. The quality control system of the major video game console
manufacturers (not only Nintendo is doing this) is what keeps the amount of
bugs and major game design flaws they contain at the release time in control
(i.e. low) until today. It is the reason for that I still rather buy a just-
released console title than a just-released PC game. Everybody who is watching
the PC game industry will have come across release disasters that made the
games simply unplayable. I'd also rather pay a little more for titles that I
can keep in the attic, and where I know that they still work after 20 years,
when the patches are not available online anymore (our Master System games
still work perfectly). If some major new-to-the-console-gaming-market company
had gotten the point about this in the mid 2000's and wouldn't have allowed
the game manufacturers to make major bug fixes to their titles after release,
we still would have mostly bug-free console titles on every major system.

Atari is relevant here for a different reason, since their Atari 2600 partly
failed because they did not have good quality control schemes, and because
low-quality buggy third-party titles flooded the market (famous examples:
PacMan, E.T. - The Extraterrestrial). Consumers simply lost interest in
spending money for titles that didn't work (something I would like to see in
the PC market today). A couple of years later, the Nintendo Entertainment
System won the customers back partly because they controlled their market.

R.I.P. Hiroshi Yamauchi.

~~~
fwonkas
Actually, both Pac-Man and E.T. were developed and published by Atari itself.
That's not to say that third-party garbage wasn't a major (and probably the
primary) problem.

~~~
irishcoffee
I actually owned and played both those games on the 2600 when I was a kid. As
it turns out, they were very buggy (and for me to recognize this as a child
says something). Not refuting your point, just an anecdotal comment.

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nakedrobot2
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...](http://www.ebay.com/sch/Vintage-
Pre1990-/155342/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=nintendo+game+watch+-magnet+-magnets&_sop=1)

~~~
netcan
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. _

~~~
contingencies
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...](http://wereldmuseumwinkel.com/pages/2/webshop.html?categoryId=13&productId=140)

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kyllo
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).

~~~
the_watcher
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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k-mcgrady
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.

~~~
robotmay
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.

~~~
circuiter
> My mum won our N64 in a toilet paper competition,

What?

~~~
JonnieCache
His mother won his family's N64 in a promotional prize draw by sending off
coupons cut out of toiler paper packaging.

~~~
jevinskie
That would make sense. I was hoping for some sort of art competition where you
could only use toilet paper and its rolls/packaging for your artwork.

------
Keyframe
RIP. Honestly, I thought he was older. Read, if you haven't Game Over
[http://www.amazon.com/Game-Over-Nintendo-Conquered-
World/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Game-Over-Nintendo-Conquered-
World/dp/0679736220) 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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nness
Leave Luck To Heaven.

~~~
dpapathanasiou
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](http://tangorin.com/general/%E4%BB%BB%E5%A4%A9%E5%A0%82)

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

~~~
w1ntermute
任天堂本社こそその意味が確実に付けられると思ってない。

[http://kotaku.com/5649625/nintendo-might-not-mean-what-
you-t...](http://kotaku.com/5649625/nintendo-might-not-mean-what-you-think)

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

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

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

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anigbrowl
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megafounder
R.I.P. I will miss u, thanks for leaving such a great legacy.

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

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

