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[Spectrum128]

Yep, read Game Over by David Sheff, it's all in there and a fantastic read. Up there with Danny the Champion of the World as one of my comfort reading faves.

 

[Seraphinianus]

http://thenintendohistorysystem.blogspot.com/ apparently

ah, i missed that the whole thing is getting collected and released at once. I guess it was just #1 on sale for a brief time.

 

[trinest]

IGN tried to bring him a girl with Green eyes. Some truck driver ruined EVERYTHING.

Wait what.

 

[OpinionatedCyborg]

Game Over really is a special book. The worst thing about it is that it ends in the early 90s (another author wrote a couple chapters covering some of the N64 years, but he did not have the access Sheff had so it's a waste of paper). I wonder if there are any Japanese language books that have covered the history of Nintendo with as much detail and access as Sheff's Game Over.

 

[Regulus Tera]

Yamauchi is omnipotent.

Just because people can't see him physically doesn't mean he's not there.

I think the word you are looking for there is omnipresent.

 

[FStop7]

LOL. 2 hour drive from Kyoto to Tokyo.... Maybe in a Bugatti. The Shinkansen takes 2h15 minutes. It's an 6-7 hour drive for a very elderly man. I don't begrudge him not attending.

Anyone who balls that hard is going by helicopter, anyhow.

 

[Jintor]

Yep, read Game Over by David Sheff, it's all in there and a fantastic read. Up there with Danny the Champion of the World as one of my comfort reading faves.

Arakawa is definitely someone I'd like to meet one day, though I think he doesn't bother with this crap anymore at all so the chances are highly unlikely.

 

[LeleSocho]

You can't tell Hiroshi Yamauchi what to do, he is a god.

 

[Cheerilee]

Yamauchi is the greatest executive ever. He must be Yakuza affiliated.

Yamauchi actually defied the Yakuza.

They told him they were going to sabotage the SNES launch if he didn't pay them protection money, so he told them to go to hell and arranged a secret midnight rollout of the system.

Although it's likely that they called a truce after he bitchslapped them, otherwise they'd still be trying to get even. Although that might be part of why he doesn't want to go out in public to watch baseball live.

 

[TheMan]

My favourite Yamauchi quote is this: yamauchi being an asshole

what is the story behind this?

 

[Combine]

We all know how he rolls.

 

[Cheerilee]

what is the story behind this?

Coleco had licensed the console rights for Donkey Kong from Nintendo (when the game was epic huge), and Nintendo went to CES to negotiate licensing the home computer rights to Atari.

At CES, Nintendo/Atari saw Coleco advertising their new home computer using an unauthorized PC port of Donkey Kong.


Arakawa was going to talk to Coleco using rational legal discussion, but Yamauchi wanted to scare the shit out of them.


Edit:

Afterward, at dinner in the hotel's Japanese restaurant, Yamauchi, his tie loosened, turned to Howard Lincoln, who was still in a state of shock, and said, "Sometimes this is the way you have to handle people, Mr. Lincoln. What did you think about that performance?"

 

[wondermega]

Didnt he told MS employees to fuck off or something about a possible sell of Nintendo...

this was a story going around years ago - ballmer or someone was sent to talk to them in Japan, and supposedly Yamauchi became enraged and climbed up on the table and told him something to the effect of "suck my little yellow hairy balls."

The story was later debunked as untrue, although it's one of those things which you still want to kinda believe, anyway

 

[Christine]

Isn't he chilling in Hawaii?

Overlording Tetris in North America, apparently.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_Online,_Inc.

 

[JDSN]

So is he supposed to go to the love hotels he owns too?

 

[Coolio McAwesome]

Yamauchi is one of the richest folks in Japan, right?

Forbes named him Japan's richest man in 2008. He's lost a lot of money since then, due to falling stock prices and the fact that he apparently likes giving money away - like the time he used $83 million dollars of his own money to build a cancer hospital.
http://www.1up.com/news/nintendo-president-yamauchi-builds-83

 

[CoffeeJanitor]

Yamauchi is the greatest executive ever. He must be Yakuza affiliated.

I remember the developers from Argonaut saying Yamauchi didn't even even know how to hold a game controller when they demonstrated Star Fox and the FX Chip to Nintendo. The guy knew absolutely nothing about games apart from how make money from them. And now he owns a team but has never seem them play ever. He's a true legend!

A true boss. Do not fuck with him.

 

[Anticitizen One]

I didn't even know yamuchi was still alive holy shit

 

[Anticitizen One]

If Yamuchi and Howard Lincoln were at Nintendo we would never have been subject to wii shovel ware, Nintendo would be kicking ass with some true next gen hardware and apple would be out of business

 

[Meier]

How are so many posters clueless about Nintendo owning the Mariners and Lincoln being the CEO? This isn't some new development..

 

[BreakyBoy]

I think the definitive English work on Nintendo is probably Game Over, though it doesn't cover the Wii era and beyond.

It's a great, entertaining read, but IIRC it's got a lot of inaccuracies. I may be mixing up my sources here, but I want to say that Chris Kohler's book Power-Up goes over some of them.

That whole section going over the fight over the rights to Tetris was absolute gold though.

 

[Codeblue]

How are so many posters clueless about Nintendo owning the Mariners and Lincoln being the CEO? This isn't some new development..

I imagine the number of people who follow video games closely enough to know who the suits are have increased quite a bit after Lincoln moved on.

 

[JoshuaJSlone]

He OWNS the Mariners? Holy shit. I did not know that.

I'll quote Wikipedia because I couldn't do a much shorter version, but my version would've been much less accurate:

In the early 1990s, the Seattle Mariners were up for sale and Washington state's senator Slade Gorton asked Nintendo America to find a Japanese investor who would keep the club in Seattle. Hiroshi Yamauchi offered to buy it even though he had never been to a baseball game. Even though the owner accepted the offer, the baseball commissioner and ownership committee was strongly opposed to the idea of a non-North American owner and did not approve the deal. However, following the strong support and sentiments of the people of Seattle and press and having the decision be deemed as racist, the commissioner formally approved the deal, under the condition that Yamauchi had less than 50% votes.

I imagine the number of people who follow video games closely enough to know who the suits are have increased quite a bit after Lincoln moved on.

We've probably got a fair number of people around here born after those events, even.