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Yamauchi Retiring from Nintendo's Board

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the calling-it-quits dept.

terrisus writes "While he had stepped down as President a few years back, Hiroshi Yamauchi had remained on Nintendo's Board of Directors. In June, however, Yamauchi will now be retiring from the Board of Directors as well. He will be foregoing his multi-million dollar retirement package, instead desiring the money be put to work in other places. He will still be a 10% stockholder in the company. It's sad to see him go."

2 of 141 comments (clear)

  1. It is sad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    But despite being sad probably not a bad thing. Yamauchi is pretty much personally responsible for the fact that Nintendo in the mid-90s were frankly a bunch of unrepentant assholes, and thus indirectly responsible for the fleeing of Square and pretty much all of the rest of Nintendo's developer base as well. His departure from the spot at the helm of Nintendo meanwhile is the chief reason for Nintendo's relative degree of recovery lately. Many companies however, such as Namco, have still indicated they retain hard feelings over the treatment they received from yamauchi.

    That said, exactly what is the functional difference between being on the board and owning 10% of the company anyway?

  2. Yamauchi wants Nintendos to make movies. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Yamauchi's last major decision at Nintendo was to get the company into animated films. http://www.joystiq.com/entry/2511842316440486/ This may be a good idea. PlayStation marginalized Nintendo's consoles, and PSP will probably marginalize Nintendo's handhelds. But if Nintendo makes CG movies in house, they could do Pixar quality animation with Ghibli-quality stories at under half of Pixar's production budget.

    Admittedly, Yamauchi wants Nintendo's first movie(s) to be about some ancient Japanese poems, but that may just be some personal favor he's asking the company to do for him, since his hobby is Go and other old Japanese stuff. After that, Nintendo will probably start adapting their games into movies, as well as making original movie franchises.

    Nintendo is a relatively small company that can't hold onto an established market once cash-rich conglomerates like Sony and Microsoft set their sights on it. Nintendo is best at creating and exploding new markets that nobody else believes in. They did it with the NES. They did it with Game Boy. They did it by bringing Pokemon to USA (in 1996, Nintendo Power itself predicted that Pokemon was too foreign to become popular in USA). Soon, Nintendo might do it again. This time with movies.