RIP.
I’ll never forget playing Nintendo for the first time. 
I was starting my own thread, but I’ll post my “news report” here.
News coming out of Japan today, former president of Nintendo, Hiroshi Yamauchi passed away at the age of 85. This man ran Nintendo for 53 years! (1942-2002) transforming it from a manufacturer of playing cards through many iterations (including love hotels) and eventually a massive video game empire.
While Nintendo’s success in video games lies mainly on the creative inspirations of Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo would never have entered and persisted in the market without Yamauchi’s guidance. After the video game crash in the early 80s, no one wanted to make home consoles anymore (arcades and PCs were still doing fine). Everyone thought it was a dead market. But Yamauchi went ahead with his plans anyways with the Famicon/NES and new life was breathed into the market.
Thank you.
The history of Nintendo, and what he did to turn that company around, is fascinating. Before they started doing arcade games, Nintendo was best known for playing cards…and “love motels”, where Yamauchi was not only the president, but also a client. It was his love for the board game Go that made him take the jump into video games, and I owe a big part of my childhood to that move!
He also came up with a number of strict guidelines which prevented Nintendo from causing another video game crash:
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Each publisher could only release 5 games a year, so they had better be good ones!
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Games could only be released with approval from Nintendo (hense the seal of quality), although that seal really had more to do with the publishers following Nintendo’s guidelines than the game actually being good. Their guidelines were that the game had to either have a definitive ending, or a high score system (and be bug free to the point where the game actually COULD be completed at home), the game couldn’t contain any content that wasn’t family friendly or religious (although we know that plenty of stuff slipped through the cracks)
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Nintendo themselves would handle all manufacturing, that way they could guarantee that the publishers didn’t cheap out on parts. Acclaim eventually appealed this and were granted the license to manufacture their games (with a MADE IN USA on the corner of the box), and sure enough, those games all had cheap labels which faded and tore very easily.
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If a publisher wanted to release a game for Nintendo, they could not release it on any other system for at least 2 years. THIS is what made the NES #1, since who wanted to release a game for Sega instead (at least until the Genesis came along…)?
Eventually all of these guidelines were deemed unconstitutional, but by that point, Nintendo was #1 and THE trusted name in home video gaming! Yamauchi was a brutal businessman, but effective.
I think Nintendo really started to lose it when Yamauchi stepped down. The Gamecube and Wii were failures compared to Sony and Xbox…the Wii had a cool gimmick which sold systems, but how many of you still use your Wii, or kept buying games rather than just playing Wii Sports? And coincidentally, I am getting my first Wii U tomorrow when the Zelda bundle gets released.
I’m pretty sure my R.O.B. is still in my parents’ basement somewhere.
That’s right, ladies. I had the R.O.B., and the gold Zelda cartridge.
buffs nails on shirt
What about the portables?
Yamauchi gets a little too much credit. There is one thing at which he was truly exceptional: recognizing and hiring good talent. Outside of that he made some pretty boneheaded decisions, like sowing the seeds for the Playstation by fucking Sony over and intentionally ordering that the N64 be difficult to program for.
Wait, what? I never heard that one. What was made difficult? I know it used MIPS, but then so did the Playstation so it can’t be that. (And MIPS is a RISC and is often used as babby’s first assembly language in colleges). Was it the graphics interface or something?
IIRC you were a programmer on an N64 game, right? What did they do to make it difficult?
NM, I was thinking of someone else, who didn’t really even have a similar name to you.
Me. I just bought a couple of games the other day for it.
It was not made to be difficult to program for. The hardware was built to fit to certain design constraints which limited the implementation. The software infrastructure surrounding it required understanding of the implementation, and Nintendo was very opposed to building a higher-level abstraction layer. Whether this was because they were afraid that it would result in slower games or because they were afraid it would make it easy to port N64 games to Playstation can only be speculated upon