Hiroshi Yamauchi

Hiroshi Yamauchi

Date of Birth: November 7, 1927

Date of Death: September 19, 2014

Hiroshi Yamauchi was the third president of Nintendo and served for 53 years. He was the person responsible for transforming Nintendo from a small Hanafuda card company to the video game giant it is today.

Biography

Early Life

Hiroshi Yamauchi was born in November 1927. Shortly afterwards, his father left his family. He was raised by his grandparents.

At age twelve, he worked at a war factory because he was too young to fight. As a child, he was considered bratty and spoiled. When World War II ended in 1945, Yamauchi went to Waseda University and majored in law. When Yamauchi was 21, his grandfather died of a stroke and he became the president of Nintendo.

Yamauchi's style of leadership has been referred to as "notoriously imperialistic." Before his grandfather died, Yamauchi made sure all of his relatives who worked at Nintendo were fired so that his leadership would go unquestioned.

Yamauchi married Michiko Inaba and they had their first child, a girl named Yoko, in 1950. It wasn't until seven years later they had another child, a daughter named Fujiko followed by a son called Katsuhito. The children were afraid of their father because he always seemed to be elusive and angry. Yamauchi's work drove a wedge between him and his family and his family hated Nintendo because of it.

Yoko married Minoru Arakawa, who would later lead Nintendo of America. Fujiko stayed in Japan and married a doctor. Katsuhito joined an advertising agency named Dentsu, which later became NDCUBE.

In Yamauchi's late 20s, his father wanted to see him, but Yamauchi refused. Later, Yamauchi was informed that his father had died of a stroke. After spending a day thinking, Yamauchi decided to go to his father's funeral and forgave him for the past.

Yamauchi decided to open an American branch to cash in on the growing arcade market. His son-in-law, Minoru Arakawa, headed the operation. Japanese hits such as Radar Scope, Space Fever, and Sheriff did poorly. It wasn't until Shigeru Miyamoto created Donkey Kong that a Nintendo game did well in America.

By this time, Nintendo had gone beyond arcade games and were producing a series of handhelds called the Game & Watch series and a series of console called Color TV Games.

The Console Years

However, the Color TV Games weren't as successful as Yamauchi had hoped. With only one game, they weren't versatile enough. He gave Masayuki Uemura and his team a task: to create a video game console that more sophisticated than the Color TV Games. The system would have to be cheap to make, but complicated enough that no one would be able to copy it for a year. On top of all that, the console must be easy to program for. According to Yamauchi, it was artist, not technicians, who made excellent games and he wanted his company to be a haven for artists. The system they created was the Nintendo Entertainment System.

Even though Yamauchi knew nothing about engineering and he had never played a video game in his life, he was the one in charge of what games Nintendo would release. Despite this, his guesses about what would be popular were surprisingly accurate.

Yamauchi, ignoring traditional corporate models, divided his company into three different teams: R&D 1, R&D 2, and R&D 3. He believed that they'd perform better if they were competing for his praise. His strategy worked well; people who had their game idea chosen were overjoyed while those who were rejected were determined to do better next time. Occasionally, employees who's ideas were rejected were so devastated that they went on sabbatical or left the company.

In 1992, Yamauchi decided to buy the Seattle Mariners. No one is quite sure why since Yamauchi didn't have much of an interest in baseball. The residents of Seattle were happy because the man that was going to buy the team previously was going to move them to Florida. The baseball commissioner tried interfere by saying that foreign ownership wasn't allowed. His argument was considered invalid because there was already teams owned by Canadians.

Retirement

Yamauchi announced his retirement several times before actually retiring. Many people speculated about his successor. Candidates included vice president Atusho Asada, Minoru Arakawa, Yamauchi's son Katsuhito Yamauchi, and Satoru Iwata.

On May 31, 2002, Yamauchi stepped down from his position as president in favor of Satoru Iwata and became the head of the board of directors. He left the board on June 2005 due to his age. He refused his pension, reportedly between $9 million and $14 million, saying that Nintendo could put it to better use. He was still known as the wealthiest in Japan in 2008, and he donated 7.5 billion yen to a cancer treatment center in Kyoto.

He died in 2013 at the age of 85, due to complications from pneumonia.

Trivia

• During the war, Hiroshi gave his supervisor some rice in exchange for an afternoon off.
• One employee referred to Yamauchi's office as "the realm of the Mother Brain."