Hiroshi Yamauchi

Hiroshi Yamauchi (山内溥, Yamauchi Hiroshi, born November 7, 1927) was the third president of Nintendo beginning in 1949 until stepping down on May 31, 2002. Yamauchi is credited with transforming Nintendo from a small hanafuda card making company in Japan to the multi-billion dollar video game company that it is today. Yamauchi was succeeded at Nintendo by Satoru Iwata. Yamauchi also became the majority owner of the Seattle Mariners baseball team in 1992, which is now managed by former Nintendo of America chairman, Howard Lincoln.

As of 2005, Yamauchi is the 366th richest person in the world, having a net worth of approximately $1.8 billion .

He is the only living ex-president of Nintendo.

Biography

Early years

Hiroshi Yamauchi was born on November 7, 1927 to Shikanojo Inaba and Kimi Yamauchi. His father, Shikanojo had previously agreed to adopt the Yamauchi family name; however, in 1933 he abandoned his family. Consequently, Hiroshi was raised by his grandparents Sekiryo and Tei Yamauchi.

In 1940 at the age of twelve, Yamauchi went to work in a military factory during World War II since he was too young to fight. When the war was over in 1945, Hiroshi went to Waseda University where he majored in Law. At the age of 21 his grandfather, the then-current president of Nintendo had a stroke and Hiroshi was requested to fill in as president. Shortly thereafter, his grandfather died.

Before Yamauchi worked at Nintendo, he owned a number of different companies, including a taxi firm and a love hotel.

Nintendo

Yamauchi led Nintendo in a "notoriously imperialistic style." Before his grandfather died, Yamauchi had him fire relatives working in the company so Yamauchi's control over the company would go unquestioned. He was the sole judge of potential new products, and only a product that appealed to him and his usually-accurate instincts went on the market.

Yamauchi decided to expand Nintendo into the United States in order to cash in on the growing American arcade market. He hired his son-in-law Minoru Arakawa to head the new American operation. When Japanese hits such as Radar Scope, Space Fever, and Sheriff did not achieve the same success in the United States, Yamauchi turned to designer Shigeru Miyamoto's pet project Donkey Kong, which became a smash hit.

GameCube

Yamauchi touted the GameCube as being a machine designed exclusively to be a video game console; an approach which he considered different to Microsoft's and Sony's for their respective Xbox and PlayStation 2 systems. He believed that the GameCube would specialize in providing the best gaming experience possible as opposed to the all-encompassing entertainment hubs being promoted in its competitor's products (both the Xbox and the PlayStation 2 have DVD and CD-ROM playback functionalities, while the Xbox also features a built-in hard drive). This bias towards "performance only" and the creation of hardware that would allow developers to "easily create games" is what Yamauchi believed would set the competitors apart from the GameCube.

Yamauchi also wanted the machine to be the cheapest available of its kind, in his belief that people "do not play with the game machine itself. They play with the software, and they are forced to purchase a game machine in order to use the software. Therefore the price of the machine should be as cheap as possible." Nintendo hence priced the GameCube significantly cheaper than its rivals in the market, although the console's games were priced identically to those designed for the competing systems.

He also sought to make sure the GameCube was a simple platform to create games for, an advantage which implied lower development costs; thus a greater number of developers would be attracted to the console, and subsequently a higher number of games would be made for it, produced and released at a faster rate.

Source: ^*

Post-Nintendo

On May 31, 2002 Yamauchi stepped down as president of Nintendo and was succeeded by the head of Nintendo's Corporate Planning Division, Satoru Iwata. Hiroshi Yamauchi subsequently became the chairman of Nintendo's board of directors. He finally left the board in June 2005 due to his age and because he felt that he was leaving the company in good hands. Yamauchi also refused to accept his retirement pension, which was reported to be around $9 million to $14 million, feeling that Nintendo could put it to better use.

References

External links

IGN's report on Yamauchi's leaving of the board of directors
N-Sider.com's article on The Mind Behind the Empire
IGN's summary of the Hiroshi Yamauchi interview at Nikkei Business Daily
ClassicGaming.com - Hiroshi Yamauchi Retires From Nintendo
Hiroshi Yamauchi On Nintendo's Future from 1UP on FindArticles.com
Biography of Hiroshi Yamauchi at Nintendo Land
Forbes Faces: Hiroshi Yamauchi
Parody: Miyamoto vs Yamauchi
Reprint of the Hiroshi Yamauchi Wired Interview that was confirmed to be a hoax