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Hiroshi Yamauchi
Hiroshi Yamauchi: headed Nintendo from 1949 to 2002. Photograph: Haruyoshi Yamaguchi/Sygma/Corbis
Hiroshi Yamauchi: headed Nintendo from 1949 to 2002. Photograph: Haruyoshi Yamaguchi/Sygma/Corbis

Nintendo ex-president Hiroshi Yamauchi dies at 85

This article is more than 10 years old
The businessman who transformed Nintendo from a playing card manufacturer to a global video game leader has passed away

Hiroshi Yamauchi, the president of Nintendo from 1949 to 2002, has died at the age of 85. In a short statement released to the press today, the company wrote, "Nintendo is in mourning today from the sad loss of the former Nintendo president Mr Hiroshi Yamauchi, who sadly passed away this morning."

Yamauchi, who took over as president after his grandfather suffered a stroke, transformed Nintendo from a little-known manufacturer of playing cards into the most powerful force in the global video game industry. It was Yamauchi who spotted talented engineer Gunpei Yokoi at one of the company's factories – Yokoi-san had built a robotic arm for his own amusement, but Yamauchi saw its potential as a product, ordered its manufacture and so kickstarted Nintendo's expansion into the toy and gadget market. Yokoi would go on to invent the hugely successful Game Boy handheld console.

Noticing the boom in the video game market, Yamauchi later tasked young artist Shigeru Miyamoto with creating an arcade machine that could attract the growing global audience. The result was Donkey Kong, a massive success in its own right, and the origin of the legendary Mario character.

The long-standing president would go on to oversee the company's entry into the home console market, which it soon utterly dominated with the Famicom and Super Famicom consoles released in the eighties and early nineties. At its height, Nintendo enjoyed a 90% share of the console hardware sector. Importantly, in the wake of the video game crash in 1983, where a glut of mediocre third-party releases for consoles such as the Atari VCS effectively devalued the whole industry, Yamauchi oversaw the introduction of Nintendo's "Seal of Quality" programme, which restricted the numbers of developers that could release games on its systems.

Although Yamauchi stepped down in 2002 to be replaced by current president Satoru Iwata, he remained a major shareholder and retained an advisory role at Nintendo.

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