Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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.
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.
-=-This sig brought to you by The Cheat; and by Viewers Like You.-=-
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.
He's 77 years old and filthy rich. What the hell does he want 10 million dollars for? He's a competitor, always has, always will be, and now he wants his side to win.