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Yamauchi Retiring from Nintendo's Board
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."
Apparently, I didn't feed it enough. I'm surprise Nintendo kept theirs alive this long.
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?
"He will be foregoing his multi-million dollar retirement package, instead desiring the money be put to work in other places"
Wow... i'm impressed... when was the last time any other executive ever gave up a multi-million dollar severance package with the advice "it's best spent on something other than me"
what would happen if exec's around the world took this example to heart?
This is not the greatest
A few powerups and he'll be back.
Mr. Yamauchi is going and so ends an era. No doubt, for a time Nintendo got too big for their boots although I have little pity when Nintendo originallly screwed Sony way back and made fools out of them.
However times changed, audienced moved on. Sony moved forward, Nintendo stood still. A stream of half baked products didn't help them and the once mighty Nintendo who simply ruled the home console market for so long became part of the past. Of course M$ didn't help much either. Difficult to know what to feel, I always got the impression Yamauchi was a bit an ol' stick in the mud and not a particularly nice person.
I'm impressed by not taking money for leaving, unlike a certain Fiorina we all know.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
The man who took nintendo from a local playing card company , to a corperate Behemoth of the Gaming world.t m?history/hist1.htm .
If it wern't for his foresight , it is likely today the only time you would hear the name nintendo , is if for some reason someone read the manufacturing info on a deck of cards during a game of poker.
http://www.nintendoland.com.nyud.net:8090/home2.h
Thats a nice quick rundown of the history of the company
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
He must have done something really bad - like help Nintendo slip out the eponym slot for "home videogame". Otherwise, he would have taken the huge retirement bonus in more stock at a preferred price (like an option), or just cash with which to buy stock like anyone else. $10M in cash infusion that way could have given the company money to use, perhaps bumping the share price up, while smoothing his transition from prez -> director -> major shareholder. Nobody's that "nice", and I'm sure many others will also be suspicious, which will hurt the company,
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make install -not war
Perhaps he should have retierd sooner , but without him , chances are Nintendo would today still be selling paper-backed playing cards
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
But .. they are still selling playing cards, like the Pokémon Trading Card game. :)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Personally, I was pretty happy/excited when I heard he was retiring. This guy might have done great things for the company way back when, but the last 10 years or so of his career were awful. The day I read the interview with him where he pretty much says "Screw Square, we don't need them!", I knew why Nintendo was slipping towards failure. I can only hope the new pres. will be able to repair the damage this guy did...
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
Your statement would be insightful except for the fact that Nintendo is a profitable company.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
Those are made by Wizards of the Coast (also the makers of Magic: The Gathering). While the orginal concept for pokemon comes from Nintendo. For the most part Nintendo doesn't influence the card game and other than royalites they don't get money from them.
Just FYI, did you know he's the largest shareholder of the Seattle Mariners?
I'm sure this is just a move to free up his schedule for more Donkey Konga.
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ok, falling into the ground then, they aren't as big as they was.
Schnapple
Actually, Nintendo took back the card making rights from WotC about a couple of years ago right after the invent of Pokemon-e. (here's a link to a news story)
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.
Thanks, for the link, I stand corrected.
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Something to look at here is exactly how much Nintendo is making off of Pokemon outside of just the actual Pokemon video games. Between the cards and the tv show and the movies, Nintendo hasn't followed the traditional paths of either making a video game and pushing it/merchandising it in the media, or a media event like a movie with a video game made about it. They've made a media phenomenon that just happens to incorporate both television media and video game aspects. And it's worked well. It might make sense to do that in other areas besides just that of ugly yellow rats that shoot lightning.
:)
Something to note is that Nintendo is slowly more and more buying up Bandai. This is the company that makes Dragonball Z. I see this as having interesting implications. You might not.
Hiroshi Yamauchi is basically Nintendo's version of Eisner at Disney, he brought them to the top and then slammed them back down. He was just using old buisness practices that were outmoded, with so much going on at Nintendo now with the DS and Revolution hopefully this will be a brand new age for them.
;)
Iwata will do a fine job, and Reggie will actually be able to kick ass and take names now
Ubuntu- Linux for human beings.
And the same stubborness and lack of reality that allowed them to rebuild and reinvent the game industry in the '80s. What exactly should they be doing differently? Losing money? Killing hookers? Forcing the industry into stasis?
And if it wasn't for people like him, we would all be starving. People who get rich by making the world a better place, and by creating jobs, deserve the money that they get.
the article that link goes to says he was president from 1949 to 2002....1949?? Asians must have slowed the aging process cause Hiroshi still looks fairly young to me. :)
... he's still alive?
especially with microsoft entering the market and try to outspend everyone... I think nintendo is worried if it followed microsoft's strategy it might end up like Sega
Some people believe 1-1=3 and for the sake of being politically correct, we should respect their differences
He did a great job running Nintendo through the 90's but he's the reason they are falling so far behind, he's the one who tells us what we want instead of listening to the gamer. Im glad to see him go, Maybe now Nintendo will regain some market share and stop with all the BS.
As much as I agree with you, I'd pay good money to see Mario kill a hooker or two.
I think you meant he did a great job running Nintendo through the 80's. The 90's would have been a disaster for Nintendo if it hadnt been for Pokemon, which in turn kept the game boy afloat and resurrected (for a while at least) the N64. Pokemon has been Nintendo's biggest money maker since Mario, who frankly hasn't been doing much since Mario64. Except for sitting in his cellar 'cleaning his pipes' so to speak... Sounds a bit like a slashdotter actually 8)
-Copyright law #69:Whenever Mickey Mouse is about to enter the public domain,copyrights get extended by 25 years.
I don't think Yamauchi necessarily drove Nintendo into the ground, but his rigid business politics did severely hurt Nintendo's market-share when Sony entered the console gaming arena. I think he underestimated Sony, and I wouldn't attribute Nintendo's gaming success to his management. That honor belongs to Miyamoto. Yamauchi was just smart enough to recognize someone with talent.
You are only as much as what you do with what you know.
You think that the playing card company would have become a gaming giant without him? I think not. Every time you play a nintendo game, you should be thanking him - without his risk taking, gaming today would not be nearly as good.
My opinion is that Nintendo's real "without this man there would be no company" person was Gumpei Yokoi.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
bullshit, money has ZERO relation to fun. and games are fundamentally about fun. take a game like warioware for DS..quite the fun game, yet it didnt cost a fortune to make like GTA San AnSHITTYdreas.
WarioWare Touched cost roughly eight times what Mario Party 3 did to make, despite having roughly half as many games.
All the best intentions in the world don't make up for false statistics. Just because you don't think it takes money to make a game doesn't mean it doesn't actually take money to make a game; surprisingly, the industry has good businesspeople involved (most industries making double what hollywood does do, y'know) and would trim the fat if indeed there were fat to trim.
Besides, what does it matter what GTA cost to make? Dollar for dollar invested it's one of the most profitable games in history, obscene exceptions like Tetris aside.
StoneCypher is Full of BS