Donkey Kong, Super Mario Brothers, Legend of Zelda: For Hiroshi Yamauchi, the hits kept coming — but he enjoyed none of them.
"I have better things to do" than play video games, he told interviewers.
Yamauchi, a gruff and uncompromising businessman who autocratically transformed Nintendo from a purveyor of playing cards to a gaming gargantuan, died in Japan on Thursday of pneumonia, his company said. He was 85.
He ran the company for 52 years, until his retirement in 2002.
Yamauchi also was an owner of the Seattle Mariners, a baseball team that was on the verge of leaving for Florida when he offered $75 million for a majority share in 1992.
He never saw his team play.
"Let me put it this way," he told the New York Times after his purchase. "Baseball, well, baseball has never really interested me."
Intense yet detached, Yamauchi built Nintendo into a company that at one time took in more revenue than any other in Japan. In the U.S., at least one in three homes had a Nintendo device. In 1990, the Q scores used by marketers indicated that more American children recognized Super Mario than Mickey Mouse.
"His contributions were inestimable," Scott Steinberg, an expert on the industry, told The Times on Thursday. "He impacted millions of individuals — entire generations who grew up with joysticks, controllers and gamepads in hand."
Steinberg called him "fiercely practical" but Yamauchi's critics called him unethical. In 1991, Nintendo settled a price-fixing case brought by U.S. agencies. In 2002, the European Commission levied a $147-million fine for the same kind of anti-competitive behavior.
At Nintendo's Kyoto headquarters, Yamauchi pitted employees against one another and was said to be merciless with the losers.
"Months of work were disposed of with a scowl," a designer told David Sheff, author of a 1994 Nintendo history called "Game Over."
full story: http://www.latimes.com/obituaries/la-me ... 7348.story
