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Nintendo visionary Hiroshi Yamauchi dies aged 85

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Nintendo visionary Hiroshi Yamauchi dies aged 85

#21

Post by jader201 »

sillysaurus2 wrote: post #5
tinco wrote: post #4

R.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…

There's an ars technica article [1] that dives deep into the early industry of video games and how Nintendo held such a tight -- almost monopolistic -- rein over its third parties. A very good read, and I found it very interesting how Nintendo did things then that there's no way would work in today's business.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/07/time-to-feel-old-insid...

Re: Nintendo visionary Hiroshi Yamauchi dies aged 85

#22

Post by netcan »

nakedrobot2 wrote: post #2

RIP. 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...

It was always having the Japanese in the periphery of my pop culture, contributing from a parallel world. They very obviously were (are) building on top of different tradition of art and storytelling.

Where I grew up a dubbed 70s manga cartoon (also about a little Italian) was one of only a handful of kids shows we got on our single TV channel.

Re: Nintendo visionary Hiroshi Yamauchi dies aged 85

#24

Post by Jach »

MattPearce wrote: post #7
tinco wrote: post #4

R.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…

What Nintendo platform did you develop for? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshi_Yamauchi#Nintendo_64

"Yamauchi admitted at the 2001 Nintendo Space World event that he had intentionally ordered the Nintendo 64 to be difficult to program games for. The idea was to repel untalented third-party developers from the console, and hence tighten the quality of third-party games. However, his plan backfired and merely increased the number of poorly developed games for the console. As a result of this, the Nintendo Gamecube was to take a step in the other direction, and provide an easy, smooth and intuitive programming environment for game developers.[6][9]"

It would have been interesting to see Yamauchi-san carry on through the Wii and Wii U/3DS eras -- what would he have done differently than Iwata? (On a side-note about the Crash, E.T. gets shit on a lot when it's arguably not so bad a game and ahead of its time in many respects: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NgL5H2RdI4 with fixes for common complaints: http://www.neocomputer.org)/projects/et/)

Re: Nintendo visionary Hiroshi Yamauchi dies aged 85

#25

Post by Keyframe »

RIP. Honestly, I thought he was older. Read, if you haven't Game Over http://www.amazon.com/Game-Over-Nintendo-Conquered-World/dp/... It is, essentially, a great book (unlike boo.com) about a startup called Nintendo. You wont regret the read, even if you're not into games.

Re: Nintendo visionary Hiroshi Yamauchi dies aged 85

#26

Post by [deleted] »

nolok wrote: post #14
johnchristopher wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The market tried, I can't find a link at the moment and I'm unsure if this was NES, SuperNES or even on a Sega console, but there was a legal battle around making a game on un-licensed cartridge. You didn't see any, because Nintendo succeeded in being in control of what could be released.

[deleted]

Re: Nintendo visionary Hiroshi Yamauchi dies aged 85

#27

Post by DanielleMolloy »

tinco wrote: post #8
sillysaurus2 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

I disagree. The quality control system of the major video game console manufacturers (not only Nintendo is doing this) is what keeps the amount of bugs and major game design flaws they contain at the release time in control (i.e. low) until today. It is the reason for that I still rather buy a just-released console title than a just-released PC game. Everybody who is watching the PC game industry will have come across release disasters that made the games simply unplayable. I'd also rather pay a little more for titles that I can keep in the attic, and where I know that they still work after 20 years, when the patches are not available online anymore (our Master System games still work perfectly). If some major new-to-the-console-gaming-market company had gotten the point about this in the mid 2000's and wouldn't have allowed the game manufacturers to make major bug fixes to their titles after release, we still would have mostly bug-free console titles on every major system.

Atari is relevant here for a different reason, since their Atari 2600 partly failed because they did not have good quality control schemes, and because low-quality buggy third-party titles flooded the market (famous examples: PacMan, E.T. - The Extraterrestrial). Consumers simply lost interest in spending money for titles that didn't work (something I would like to see in the PC market today). A couple of years later, the Nintendo Entertainment System won the customers back partly because they controlled their market.

R.I.P. Hiroshi Yamauchi.

Re: Nintendo visionary Hiroshi Yamauchi dies aged 85

#28

Post by sspiff »

mathgeek wrote: post #20
sspiff wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't you feel a little sad when you vaguely remember those days? I'm only 26 but my memories about those "golden days" are becoming harder and harder to find. I got an N64 at the age of 10 when my brother and I got "good grades for an entire year" in primary school. It was my first console (and we didn't have a computer). I started claiming I wanted to make videogames around the age of 7, so it was almost like a def…

> Don't you feel a little sad when you vaguely remember those days? I'm only 26 but my memories about those "golden days" are becoming harder and harder to find. Creating those kinds of moments for your kids is even better than experiencing them as a kid yourself (for me, anyway).

I hope so, I'm not in that stage of my life yet. Right now, I fear that having children will just completely kill my ability to do anything as a hobby. I'm not sure how justified that is, but it's how I feel.

Re: Nintendo visionary Hiroshi Yamauchi dies aged 85

#30

Post by ekianjo »

sillysaurus2 wrote: post #16
du wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a related note: Yamauchi was 55 when the NES was released and he retired some time after the Gamecube at 74. Steve died at 56, makes one wonder what else he could've given us.

Especially if he hadn't ignored his doctors with homeopathy! Every time I think about it, I wonder how anyone could fall victim to such things. Imagine Steve Jobs being thrown into prison for 20 years. Homeopathy was just as horrific, because it gave him an excuse to ignore his doctors and allow the cancer to fester.

Jobs was never known to be a rational man.
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