Hiroshi Yamauchi
Hiroshi Yamauchi (1927-11-07 - 2013-09-19) was a Japanese businessman and president of Nintendo. During the time he led the company, he transformed it from a playing card manufacturer into a highly successful electronic video game company by using brutal imperialistic business tactics. Much of Nintendo's success and domination of the video game market through the 1980s and early-1990s was due to his guidance, but his ruthlessness also caused Nintendo to lose its stranglehold and, by the end of the 1990s, the company was losing ground to Sony, Sega, and Microsoft.
Yamauchi served as the executive producer for pretty much every Nintendo game from 1974-2002, but, considering the number of games and his non-gaming background, I doubt he had a direct influence on any of the games on which he is credited. However, it is probably fair to say his belief that video games should be designed by artists rather than technicians, and the fact that he hired talented motivated staff, certainly influenced Nintendo's ability to make such wonderful games.
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