Hiroshi Yamauchi, The Man Who Made Nintendo, Well, Nintendo, Has Passed Away
Sad news in the video game world, folks. The man who helped make Nintendo into the juggernaut that it is today, Hiroshi Yamauchi, has passed away. He was 85 years old.
He was president of Nintendo from 1949 to 2002, and served on the board of directors after that until 2005. His biggest achievement was to take Nintendo, then a trading card company, and make it into a video gaming heavyweight in the 1980’s. It’s not a stretch to say that in this way he altered the landscape of gaming forever, first by getting Nintendo into the arcade business, and then taking the company into the living room by introducing the NES.
He presided over from the NES to the Gamecube, and helped usher in the Gameboy. Of course, a game system just won’t work if there are no good games for it, and while he might not have been the man to create such characters like Mario, or Link, he knew just who to hire: Shigeru Miyamoto. He was the companies largest shareholder at the time of his death, and was likely still the company’s biggest supporter. The gaming world has lost a true visionary.
