September 22, 2013

Hiroshi Yamauchi 1927-2013

Hiroshi Yamauchi has passed away.


For 53 years he led Nintendo, and through that helped change the world.

Mr Yamauchi ran the company from 1949 until 2002.

In that time, he took what was a small-time collectable trading card company and built it into one of the most recognisable - and successful - video games brands today.



His achievement was remarkable, as was his foresight. He not only recognized the potential for video games, ge picked the right people to develop them and gave them sufficient creative freedom to succeed. Getting his games into the US Arcade market at a time (the early '80s) that there was considerable antipathy towards all things Japanese was no mean feat.


It's hard to get ones head around the impact he had.
 

His story gets more remarkable still...

The article mentions that he made mistakes and encountered setbacks in the shaky postwar economy. However he learned from them and, most remarkably, after paying off the debt those setbacks incurred, never went into debt for a business venture again.
Even today, Nintendo carries no debt.

Wow!

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