Nintendo visionary Hiroshi Yamauchi dies aged 85
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Re: Nintendo visionary Hiroshi Yamauchi dies aged 85
#2RIP. You touched many lives, many childhoods were brightened by your game-and-watches, your chimneys inhabited by man-eating plants, your moustached italian plumber heroes. I hope to inspire 1/1,000,000 as many people.
edit: here are some Nintendo Game and Watch devices on eBay for all you young runts. http://www.ebay.com/sch/Vintage-Pre1990-/155342/i.html?_from...
Re: Nintendo visionary Hiroshi Yamauchi dies aged 85
#3The N64 was the first proper games console I owned (I got it as a gift when I was 7). I spent so much time on it and had a lot of fun (I even brought it on holiday with me :). I still love to dig it out of the attic every now and then. Even though I'm not 'a gamer' it holds a lot of happy memories for me. RIP.
Re: Nintendo visionary Hiroshi Yamauchi dies aged 85
#4R.I.P, I idolized this man as a child, being a fervent subscriber to Nintendo propaganda magazines.
Nowadays my opinion of him is more nuanced. Like Steve Jobs, he built these perfect products by being an absolutely ruthless business man.
The way he treated Nintendo business partners makes the Apple app store look like kinder garten. How many game developers and studios must be cursing his grave?
Yet from his iron shelve management strategies and business practices sprouted a range of exquisite products that every young adult remembers with tremendous fondness and respect. He truly was putting consumer experience over everything else.
I think that's what we should thank him for :)
Re: Nintendo visionary Hiroshi Yamauchi dies aged 85
#5R.I.P, I idolized this man as a child, being a fervent subscriber to Nintendo propaganda magazines. Nowadays my opinion of him is more nuanced. Like Steve Jobs, he built these perfect products by being an absolutely ruthless business man. The way he treated Nintendo business partners makes the Apple app store look like kinder garten. How many game developers and studios must be cursing his grave? Yet from his iron sh…
That's very interesting. I know nothing about him, but I'm very intrigued to hear more about his ruthless business practices.
Nowadays there's less stigma attached to the idea of being a ruthless businessman. In fact, it's often considered meritous. So I don't think it would be disrespectful to highlight some of the things he's done. After all, it's a testament to what it took to build a company of the caliber of Nintendo.
What sort of strategies did he employ?
Re: Nintendo visionary Hiroshi Yamauchi dies aged 85
#6The N64 was the first proper games console I owned (I got it as a gift when I was 7). I spent so much time on it and had a lot of fun (I even brought it on holiday with me :). I still love to dig it out of the attic every now and then. Even though I'm not 'a gamer' it holds a lot of happy memories for me. RIP.
My mum won our N64 in a toilet paper competition, which was great because we wouldn't have been able to afford it otherwise. My brother and I spent so much time together playing on it and I don't think I've ever enjoyed games quite as much as I did at that time.
Re: Nintendo visionary Hiroshi Yamauchi dies aged 85
#7R.I.P, I idolized this man as a child, being a fervent subscriber to Nintendo propaganda magazines. Nowadays my opinion of him is more nuanced. Like Steve Jobs, he built these perfect products by being an absolutely ruthless business man. The way he treated Nintendo business partners makes the Apple app store look like kinder garten. How many game developers and studios must be cursing his grave? Yet from his iron sh…
As a developer (and one who has worked with Nintendo as a third party), I have nothing but respect for the man.
You are right in comparing him to Jobs:
" In 1986, Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi noted that "Atari collapsed because they gave too much freedom to third-party developers and the market was swamped with rubbish games." In response, Nintendo limited the number of titles that third-party developers could release for their system each year, and promoted its "Seal of Quality", which it allowed to be used on games and peripherals by publishers that met Nintendo's quality standards." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_video_game_crash...
Re: Nintendo visionary Hiroshi Yamauchi dies aged 85
#8R.I.P, I idolized this man as a child, being a fervent subscriber to Nintendo propaganda magazines. Nowadays my opinion of him is more nuanced. Like Steve Jobs, he built these perfect products by being an absolutely ruthless business man. The way he treated Nintendo business partners makes the Apple app store look like kinder garten. How many game developers and studios must be cursing his grave? Yet from his iron sh…
That's very interesting. I know nothing about him, but I'm very intrigued to hear more about his ruthless business practices. Nowadays there's less stigma attached to the idea of being a ruthless businessman. In fact, it's often considered meritous. So I don't think it would be disrespectful to highlight some of the things he's done. After all, it's a testament to what it took to build a company of the caliber of Nin…
Well for example the shelve management of the cartride game systems. If you would want to produce a game for the SNES, to actually distribute it you would have to put it on a cartridge and sell it.
But the design and specifications of these cartridges was protected by Nintendo, so the only way to distribute a game was to ask Nintendo for cartridges. Because Nintendo would only allow quality games on its shelves, it would test your game before allowing you any cartridges, so your game basically had to be nearly finished before you could ask Nintendo for cartridges. Of course if you were refused at this point you would have already invested tons of money so it would be pretty ruinous.
Besides the go/no-go signal, Nintendo also controlled the _amount_ of cartridges you would get. If Nintendo decided (much like Apple did in recent years) that your game was more valuable if it had limited copies, then you wouldn't get many copies, regardless if that would leave you with not enough revenue to make a profit.
Reasons for refusal of cartridges were both fair and rather unfair. For example you could be refused for lack of quality, but you could also be refused because another game in your genre already had shelve space and they didn't want to endanger its dominance. Basically you were at the complete mercy of how Nintendo wanted to make maximum profit for it self.
I have heard, though I don't know for sure (maybe someone could check it :P) that Atari eventually went bankrupt because it decided to make a Nintendo game (as a last resort perhaps), got into a conflict with Nintendo, sued them, and lost..
Re: Nintendo visionary Hiroshi Yamauchi dies aged 85
#9I have a closet that's about 10% filled with games and systems created by his company.
Re: Nintendo visionary Hiroshi Yamauchi dies aged 85
#10R.I.P, I idolized this man as a child, being a fervent subscriber to Nintendo propaganda magazines. Nowadays my opinion of him is more nuanced. Like Steve Jobs, he built these perfect products by being an absolutely ruthless business man. The way he treated Nintendo business partners makes the Apple app store look like kinder garten. How many game developers and studios must be cursing his grave? Yet from his iron sh…
As a developer (and one who has worked with Nintendo as a third party), I have nothing but respect for the man. You are right in comparing him to Jobs: " In 1986, Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi noted that "Atari collapsed because they gave too much freedom to third-party developers and the market was swamped with rubbish games." In response, Nintendo limited the number of titles that third-party developers could…
As a child I used to wonder about that "Seal of Quality" because it was on every Nintendo game you could find. Every game had this seal.
Either it was a Nintendo gimmick or the market didn't offer games that didn't have the seal.
edit: lost myself in a double negation