Nintendo visionary Hiroshi Yamauchi dies aged 85 | Hacker News Reader

Nintendo visionary Hiroshi Yamauchi dies aged 85

bbc.co.uk

433 pointsT-zex63 comments

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 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 :)

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...

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/)

I worked on a title for the 3DS. I don't have experience with the N64, so I can't speak for their policies around that time.

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 seal was basically the same as saying "this game is licensed by Nintendo." There were some games without the seal, but they were unauthorized and typically Nintendo sued them.

You couldn't get a game on a standard Nintendo cartridge without being licensed, so these games were actually put on reverse-engineered, custom manufactured cartridges[1] that overloaded the piracy detection circuit[2] on the NES.

Interestingly, when Nintendo built the Game Boy, they came up with a novel way of protecting it from unlicensed games: They made the system check that the console had a bitmap of the Nintendo logo at a specific part of the cartridge memory, and refused to boot if it was not there. Unlicensed cartridge manufacturers could then be sued for trademark infringement.[3] This logo was actually the one displayed when the console booted up, which is why if you booted the console without a cartridge inserted, you would see a black rectangle in the place where the Nintendo logo normally appeared.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_(Atari)

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10NES

[3] http://fantranslation.org/ja/node/16

The trademark infringement strategy is great and super scary at the same time

My understanding is that Sega v. Accolade[1] made it moot, so trademark infringement can no longer be claimed in such a manner (it's now considered fair use).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade

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.

It was the NES, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10NES

They eventually lost I believe, and some developers worked around it by making cartridges that would pass through the chip from an existing game.

Super Noah's Ark 3D was an unlicensed SNES cartridge that needed an official cartridge "pass through" to work.

http://static.giantbomb.com/uploads/original/1/14684/383841-...

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?

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..

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.

Actually, both Pac-Man and E.T. were developed and published by Atari itself. That's not to say that third-party garbage wasn't a major (and probably the primary) problem.

I actually owned and played both those games on the 2600 when I was a kid. As it turns out, they were very buggy (and for me to recognize this as a child says something). Not refuting your point, just an anecdotal comment.

@fwonkas: OK, thanks for clarifying this!

The GP wasn't saying that exercising quality control as a platform holder is a bad idea, just that Nintendo engaged in some ethically dubious practices at the time. The most obvious evidence: Nintendo did excellently in Japan while exerting significantly less pressure than they did on companies that wished to produce games for the American market. The Famicom had no lockout chip. Nintendo did not impose a strict 3 game per-year limit in the Japanese market like they did in America. Third parties were allowed to manufacture their own game cartridges; there is direct physical evidence of this fact in the varying shapes and vibrant colors of the cartridges themselves[1], and the existence of customs ICs and discrete mapper designs common in Famicom cartriges. In addition to slimming margins for third party developers, this also made supply and demand problems very difficult to deal with, as tinco mentioned. Remember how Nintendo infamously forbade third party devs from publishing games for competing platforms in America? Didn't happen in Japan, and so a fair amount of early Famicom games received ports to the MSX and other Japanese computers.

The Famicom did have some amount of Atari 2600-goldrush-esque crappy games (some licensed, some not), but it didn't stop the console from being a huge success. This suggests to me that Nintendo's reasoning was only part "Americans will flood the market with shitty games again if we don't do something about it," with pure monopolistic greed being the other part.

With all due respect to Hiroshi Yamauchi, I don't think their business practices during this era should be considered at all admirable, and I don't think it's right to credit their monopolistic practices for "saving the medium."

that game was tetris, and youtube has a fascinating documentary about it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fn9dO_iL7lo

sillysaurus2: this has some of yamauchi being a ruthless sumbitch.

Thanks, great summary but Apple doesn't determine the price of apps on the App Store. On the other hand Amazon does do that on their Android app store.

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...

There is a very good description in this book: "Game Over: How Nintendo Conquered The World" http://www.amazon.com/Game-Over-Nintendo-Conquered-World/dp/...

It's fake, but a few years ago there was a story about a meeting between him and Steve Ballmer. Google for "HEY, BALLMER, WHY DON'T YOU SUCK MY TINY YELLOW BALLS?"

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.

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.

On the different tradition of art and storytelling meme, a really cool exhibition just finished at the Rotterdam Wereldmuseum in Holland showing the evolution of Japanese manga from early Buddhist deities and Edo period printmaking. The book is 25EUR: http://wereldmuseumwinkel.com/pages/2/webshop.html?categoryI...

RIP. Hiroshi Yamauchi was also the majority owner of the Seattle Mariners baseball club, and is responsible for keeping the team in Seattle in the late 90s when there was a very high chance of it being sold off to another city. He never attended a Mariners game, and didn't even like baseball, but purchased it as a way of saying "thank you" to Seattle for its support of Nintendo (Nintendo of America is headquartered in Redmond, just a few miles from Microsoft).

Without him, the Mariners would be in Tampa, and we may have never gotten to enjoy the wonders of Ichiro, or the incredible 2001 season (not to mention that he was the first owner willing to take the plunge on Japanese position players). Seattle fans who forget this, imagine if someone like him had been around to save the Sonics.
RIP.

Nintendo of America isn't even "just a few miles" from Microsoft. It's almost completely surrounded by the Microsoft campus.

The 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.

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 defining moment in my life :) I have a lot of great memories with that thing, and still think the controller design (though not the build) is the best of any console ever.
After we got the N64, we suddenly had many more friends who wanted to come over and play! I evangelized the N64 and eventually there were 4 of us who got one, so we could swap tons of games. (Game acquisition for kids in those days was hard!)
Been a huge Nintendo fan ever since. My N64 is still hooked up to the TV.

> 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.

I'm 27 now and I feel the same way. I still think I won't end up with kids with time running short but I'm an uncle to two boys and a friends daughter calls me uncle. I just hope I have enough money to send them all on adventures. So I really hope what the gp says is true. Though it will be harder to have just the right kids books laying about.

IME it's more a question of spouse than of having children. At first, a child is a black hole for your time. Later they're a lot of fun. Just think of giving them love, more than education.

My dad says the same thing. FWIW, he managed to craft the perfect young childhood for me. I was born in a small, semi-rural college town, moved to a bigger city when I was 10. This means that around the time I started to become aware of some of the sadness of life (and actual sad things began to happen, like my parents divorcing), I was in a different city. This preservation of my earliest, most innocent time has given me kind of a safe-haven. The town has changed (and so have I), but there is so much there that I recognize and have memories of. I try to go back and visit every few years. Although there's always some sense of sadness and loss (friends I no longer know, family bonds broken, realizing that my childhood has truly passed, etc.), those newer memories never butt out the old ones; if anything, they just refresh them.
That's something I'm going to think about when I have kids; how to preserve their earliest happy memories such that they will feel like they can revisit them as an adult to take solace.

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.

> My mum won our N64 in a toilet paper competition,
What?

His mother won his family's N64 in a promotional prize draw by sending off coupons cut out of toiler paper packaging.

That would make sense. I was hoping for some sort of art competition where you could only use toilet paper and its rolls/packaging for your artwork.

What kind of toilet paper competition?

One where you win an N64! It was some sort of mail-the-coupon-in thing from Andrex in the UK.

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.

Leave Luck To Heaven.

For those who don't get it, that's the loose way of translating the three characters[1] which make up the name "Nintendo" in Japanese, though you wouldn't necessarily know it by looking them up one by one[2].
[1] 任天堂
[2] http://tangorin.com/general/%E4%BB%BB%E5%A4%A9%E5%A0%82

You would not even translate it this way. :P You dont just stitch meaning to kanji like that in Japanese :P

任天堂本社こそその意味が確実に付けられると思ってない。
http://kotaku.com/5649625/nintendo-might-not-mean-what-you-t...

It's not the way I would translate it myself (I would say it's just a name, and really has no meaning), but it is a common English interpretation that's been floating out there.

「運」という意味がその３つのどの漢字にも入ってないよ。

It doesn't really make any sense, but that's the official story even inside Nintendo (of America).
And using Japanese here is pointless.

And using Japanese here is pointless.
We're just doing our best to show off ;)

おっしゃる通りです。ただ、「何」を天に任せると聞かれたら、「運」がいちおう適当な返事でしょう、ね。

R.I.P Thanks for creating our childhood a thoughtful and amazing paradise.

I have a closet that's about 10% filled with games and systems created by his company.

I started to love Nintendo when I've got my GameBoy. I remember crying out loud in Geneva when my mother refused to buy me GameBoy color with Earthworm Jim :-)
Renting out N64 with my friend and playing it as much as we could through 1 month. I'm still a fan of Nintendo, this year bought Wii U and having fun with it. RIP

Not sure if what i heard is true but i have been told that he had never played games himself.

______________________________________________________________

R.I.P. I will miss u, thanks for leaving such a great legacy.

RIP! you were a great visionary! and one everyone will miss

RIP. A great man from the entertainment industry. I hope Nintendo come up with a great and powerful console after the Wii U generation.

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