He was a game changer!
Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi — who transformed the company from a small playing card firm to the world’s biggest video game maker — died on Thursday of complications following pneumonia. He was 85.
Yamauchi, who was the grandson of the company’s founder, ran Nintendo for 50 years — launching revolutionary games like Super Mario Brothers and Zelda.
Yamauchi took over the company in 1949 after failed attempts to expand what was then a lowly toy firm and eventually became the richest man in Japan, according to London’s Daily Telegraph.
Gamers took to Twitter to mourn the loss of a man some consider the Steve Jobs of the videogame world.
“Rest in peace Hiroshi Yamauchi. Thanks for making my childhood fun,” wrote @condemnedcustom.
Others called him a genius responsible for game playing as we know it.
“Modern gaming owes an awful lot to his skill,” wrote @famousrob.
Yamauchi revived the company after a brush with bankruptcy in and failed attempts at selling toy guns and baby strollers in the 1960s.
He eventually teamed up with then-revolutionary game designers in the late 1970s.
Under his leadership, the company released the world’s first hand-held game player in 1980. Super Mario Bros and the Nintendo Entertainment System followed in 1985.
He and the firm then launched Donkey Kong, Zelda and Mario the Plumber with the help of Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo’s chief game designer.
His philosophy was that the quality of video game is more important than its hardware.
“You cannot underestimate the influence the man had on the games industry,” Rob Crossley, associate editor of Computer and Video Games magazine, told BBC news.
He also became an owner of the Seattle Mariners baseball team in 1992 and was Nintendo’s second largest shareholder.