Hiroshi Yamauchi

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 from the mid-1980s to the early-1990s was due to his guidance, but his ruthlessness also caused Nintendo to lose its stranglehold and, by the early 2000s, the company had lost a lot of ground to Sony and Microsoft.

Yamauchi served as the executive producer for pretty much every Nintendo game made from 1974-2002, but, considering the sheer number of games credited to him, and his non-gaming background, I doubt he had much of an influence on any of the games in 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 like Gunpei Yokoi, Shigeru Miyamoto, and Takashi Tezuka, certainly influenced Nintendo's ability to make such wonderful games.

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