4 ms·

R.I.P, I idolized this man as a child, being a fervent subscriber to Nintendo propaganda magazines. Nowadays my opinion of him is more nuanced. Like Steve Jobs

by tinco 13y ago

R.I.P, I idolized this man as a child, being a fervent subscriber to Nintendo propaganda magazines. Nowadays my opinion of him is more nuanced. Like Steve Jobs, he built these perfect products by being an absolutely ruthless business man. The way he treated Nintendo business partners makes the Apple app store look like kinder garten. How many game developers and studios must be cursing his grave? Yet from his iron shelve management strategies and business practices sprouted a range of exquisite products that every young adult remembers with tremendous fondness and respect. He truly was putting consumer experience over everything else. I think that's what we should thank him for :)

sillysaurus2 13y ago
That's very interesting. I know nothing about him, but I'm very intrigued to hear more about his ruthless business practices. Nowadays there's less stigma attached to the idea of being a ruthless businessman. In fact, it's often considered meritous. So I don't think it would be disrespectful to highlight some of the things he's done. After all, it's a testament to what it took to build a company of the caliber of Nintendo. What sort of strategies did he employ?
- tinco 13y ago
  Well for example the shelve management of the cartride game systems. If you would want to produce a game for the SNES, to actually distribute it you would have to put it on a cartridge and sell it. But the design and specifications of these cartridges was protected by Nintendo, so the only way to distribute a game was to ask Nintendo for cartridges. Because Nintendo would only allow quality games on its shelves, it would test your game before allowing you any cartridges, so your game basically had to be nearly finished before you could ask Nintendo for cartridges. Of course if you were refused at this point you would have already invested tons of money so it would be pretty ruinous. Besides the go/no-go signal, Nintendo also controlled the _amount_ of cartridges you would get. If Nintendo decided (much like Apple did in recent years) that your game was more valuable if it had limited copies, then you wouldn't get many copies, regardless if that would leave you with not enough revenue to make a profit. Reasons for refusal of cartridges were both fair and rather unfair. For example you could be refused for lack of quality, but you could also be refused because another game in your genre already had shelve space and they didn't want to endanger its dominance. Basically you were at the complete mercy of how Nintendo wanted to make maximum profit for it self. I have heard, though I don't know for sure (maybe someone could check it :P) that Atari eventually went bankrupt because it decided to make a Nintendo game (as a last resort perhaps), got into a conflict with Nintendo, sued them, and lost..
  - TheZenPsycho 13y ago
    that game was tetris, and youtube has a fascinating documentary about it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fn9dO_iL7lo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fn9dO_iL7lo sillysaurus2: this has some of yamauchi being a ruthless sumbitch.
  - DanielleMolloy 13y ago
    I disagree. The quality control system of the major video game console manufacturers (not only Nintendo is doing this) is what keeps the amount of bugs and major game design flaws they contain at the release time in control (i.e. low) until today. It is the reason for that I still rather buy a just-released console title than a just-released PC game. Everybody who is watching the PC game industry will have come across release disasters that made the games simply unplayable. I'd also rather pay a little more for titles that I can keep in the attic, and where I know that they still work after 20 years, when the patches are not available online anymore (our Master System games still work perfectly). If some major new-to-the-console-gaming-market company had gotten the point about this in the mid 2000's and wouldn't have allowed the game manufacturers to make major bug fixes to their titles after release, we still would have mostly bug-free console titles on every major system. Atari is relevant here for a different reason, since their Atari 2600 partly failed because they did not have good quality control schemes, and because low-quality buggy third-party titles flooded the market (famous examples: PacMan, E.T. - The Extraterrestrial). Consumers simply lost interest in spending money for titles that didn't work (something I would like to see in the PC market today). A couple of years later, the Nintendo Entertainment System won the customers back partly because they controlled their market. R.I.P. Hiroshi Yamauchi.
    - fwonkas 13y ago
      Actually, both Pac-Man and E.T. were developed and published by Atari itself. That's not to say that third-party garbage wasn't a major (and probably the primary) problem.
      - irishcoffee 13y ago
        I actually owned and played both those games on the 2600 when I was a kid. As it turns out, they were very buggy (and for me to recognize this as a child says something). Not refuting your point, just an anecdotal comment.
- throwawaichi 13y ago
  It's fake, but a few years ago there was a story about a meeting between him and Steve Ballmer. Google for "HEY, BALLMER, WHY DON'T YOU SUCK MY TINY YELLOW BALLS?"
- magoghm 13y ago
  There is a very good description in this book: "Game Over: How Nintendo Conquered The World" http://www.amazon.com/Game-Over-Nintendo-Conquered-World/dp/0679736220/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1379593149&sr=8-6&keywords=game+over http://www.amazon.com/Game-Over-Nintendo-Conquered-World/dp/...
- jader201 13y ago
  There's an ars technica article [1] that dives deep into the early industry of video games and how Nintendo held such a tight -- almost monopolistic -- rein over its third parties. A very good read, and I found it very interesting how Nintendo did things then that there's no way would work in today's business. [1] http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/07/time-to-feel-old-inside-the-nes-on-its-30th-birthday http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/07/time-to-feel-old-insid...
MattPearce 13y ago
As a developer (and one who has worked with Nintendo as a third party), I have nothing but respect for the man. You are right in comparing him to Jobs: " In 1986, Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi noted that "Atari collapsed because they gave too much freedom to third-party developers and the market was swamped with rubbish games." In response, Nintendo limited the number of titles that third-party developers could release for their system each year, and promoted its "Seal of Quality", which it allowed to be used on games and peripherals by publishers that met Nintendo's quality standards." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_video_game_crash_of_1983 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_video_game_crash...
- johnchristopher 13y ago
  As a child I used to wonder about that "Seal of Quality" because it was on every Nintendo game you could find. Every game had this seal. Either it was a Nintendo gimmick or the market didn't offer games that didn't have the seal. edit: lost myself in a double negation
  - nolok 13y ago
    The market tried, I can't find a link at the moment and I'm unsure if this was NES, SuperNES or even on a Sega console, but there was a legal battle around making a game on un-licensed cartridge. You didn't see any, because Nintendo succeeded in being in control of what could be released.
    - simcop2387 13y ago
      It was the NES, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10NES http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10NES They eventually lost I believe, and some developers worked around it by making cartridges that would pass through the chip from an existing game.
      - aestra 13y ago
        Super Noah's Ark 3D was an unlicensed SNES cartridge that needed an official cartridge "pass through" to work. http://static.giantbomb.com/uploads/original/1/14684/383841-noah.jpg http://static.giantbomb.com/uploads/original/1/14684/383841-...
du 13y ago
On a related note: Yamauchi was 55 when the NES was released and he retired some time after the Gamecube at 74. Steve died at 56, makes one wonder what else he could've given us.
- sillysaurus2 13y ago
  Especially if he hadn't ignored his doctors with homeopathy! Every time I think about it, I wonder how anyone could fall victim to such things. Imagine Steve Jobs being thrown into prison for 20 years. Homeopathy was just as horrific, because it gave him an excuse to ignore his doctors and allow the cancer to fester.
  - ekianjo 13y ago
    Jobs was never known to be a rational man.

by tinco 13y ago

sillysaurus2 13y ago

That's very interesting. I know nothing about him, but I'm very intrigued to hear more about his ruthless business practices. Nowadays there's less stigma attached to the idea of being a ruthless businessman. In fact, it's often considered meritous. So I don't think it would be disrespectful to highlight some of the things he's done. After all, it's a testament to what it took to build a company of the caliber of Nintendo. What sort of strategies did he employ?

tinco 13y ago
Well for example the shelve management of the cartride game systems. If you would want to produce a game for the SNES, to actually distribute it you would have to put it on a cartridge and sell it. But the design and specifications of these cartridges was protected by Nintendo, so the only way to distribute a game was to ask Nintendo for cartridges. Because Nintendo would only allow quality games on its shelves, it would test your game before allowing you any cartridges, so your game basically had to be nearly finished before you could ask Nintendo for cartridges. Of course if you were refused at this point you would have already invested tons of money so it would be pretty ruinous. Besides the go/no-go signal, Nintendo also controlled the _amount_ of cartridges you would get. If Nintendo decided (much like Apple did in recent years) that your game was more valuable if it had limited copies, then you wouldn't get many copies, regardless if that would leave you with not enough revenue to make a profit. Reasons for refusal of cartridges were both fair and rather unfair. For example you could be refused for lack of quality, but you could also be refused because another game in your genre already had shelve space and they didn't want to endanger its dominance. Basically you were at the complete mercy of how Nintendo wanted to make maximum profit for it self. I have heard, though I don't know for sure (maybe someone could check it :P) that Atari eventually went bankrupt because it decided to make a Nintendo game (as a last resort perhaps), got into a conflict with Nintendo, sued them, and lost..
- TheZenPsycho 13y ago
  that game was tetris, and youtube has a fascinating documentary about it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fn9dO_iL7lo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fn9dO_iL7lo sillysaurus2: this has some of yamauchi being a ruthless sumbitch.
- DanielleMolloy 13y ago
  I disagree. The quality control system of the major video game console manufacturers (not only Nintendo is doing this) is what keeps the amount of bugs and major game design flaws they contain at the release time in control (i.e. low) until today. It is the reason for that I still rather buy a just-released console title than a just-released PC game. Everybody who is watching the PC game industry will have come across release disasters that made the games simply unplayable. I'd also rather pay a little more for titles that I can keep in the attic, and where I know that they still work after 20 years, when the patches are not available online anymore (our Master System games still work perfectly). If some major new-to-the-console-gaming-market company had gotten the point about this in the mid 2000's and wouldn't have allowed the game manufacturers to make major bug fixes to their titles after release, we still would have mostly bug-free console titles on every major system. Atari is relevant here for a different reason, since their Atari 2600 partly failed because they did not have good quality control schemes, and because low-quality buggy third-party titles flooded the market (famous examples: PacMan, E.T. - The Extraterrestrial). Consumers simply lost interest in spending money for titles that didn't work (something I would like to see in the PC market today). A couple of years later, the Nintendo Entertainment System won the customers back partly because they controlled their market. R.I.P. Hiroshi Yamauchi.
  - fwonkas 13y ago
    Actually, both Pac-Man and E.T. were developed and published by Atari itself. That's not to say that third-party garbage wasn't a major (and probably the primary) problem.
    - irishcoffee 13y ago
      I actually owned and played both those games on the 2600 when I was a kid. As it turns out, they were very buggy (and for me to recognize this as a child says something). Not refuting your point, just an anecdotal comment.
throwawaichi 13y ago
It's fake, but a few years ago there was a story about a meeting between him and Steve Ballmer. Google for "HEY, BALLMER, WHY DON'T YOU SUCK MY TINY YELLOW BALLS?"
magoghm 13y ago
There is a very good description in this book: "Game Over: How Nintendo Conquered The World" http://www.amazon.com/Game-Over-Nintendo-Conquered-World/dp/0679736220/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1379593149&sr=8-6&keywords=game+over http://www.amazon.com/Game-Over-Nintendo-Conquered-World/dp/...
jader201 13y ago
There's an ars technica article [1] that dives deep into the early industry of video games and how Nintendo held such a tight -- almost monopolistic -- rein over its third parties. A very good read, and I found it very interesting how Nintendo did things then that there's no way would work in today's business. [1] http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/07/time-to-feel-old-inside-the-nes-on-its-30th-birthday http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/07/time-to-feel-old-insid...

MattPearce 13y ago

As a developer (and one who has worked with Nintendo as a third party), I have nothing but respect for the man. You are right in comparing him to Jobs: " In 1986, Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi noted that "Atari collapsed because they gave too much freedom to third-party developers and the market was swamped with rubbish games." In response, Nintendo limited the number of titles that third-party developers could release for their system each year, and promoted its "Seal of Quality", which it allowed to be used on games and peripherals by publishers that met Nintendo's quality standards." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_video_game_crash_of_1983 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_video_game_crash...

johnchristopher 13y ago
As a child I used to wonder about that "Seal of Quality" because it was on every Nintendo game you could find. Every game had this seal. Either it was a Nintendo gimmick or the market didn't offer games that didn't have the seal. edit: lost myself in a double negation
- nolok 13y ago
  The market tried, I can't find a link at the moment and I'm unsure if this was NES, SuperNES or even on a Sega console, but there was a legal battle around making a game on un-licensed cartridge. You didn't see any, because Nintendo succeeded in being in control of what could be released.
  - simcop2387 13y ago
    It was the NES, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10NES http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10NES They eventually lost I believe, and some developers worked around it by making cartridges that would pass through the chip from an existing game.
    - aestra 13y ago
      Super Noah's Ark 3D was an unlicensed SNES cartridge that needed an official cartridge "pass through" to work. http://static.giantbomb.com/uploads/original/1/14684/383841-noah.jpg http://static.giantbomb.com/uploads/original/1/14684/383841-...

du 13y ago

On a related note: Yamauchi was 55 when the NES was released and he retired some time after the Gamecube at 74. Steve died at 56, makes one wonder what else he could've given us.

sillysaurus2 13y ago
Especially if he hadn't ignored his doctors with homeopathy! Every time I think about it, I wonder how anyone could fall victim to such things. Imagine Steve Jobs being thrown into prison for 20 years. Homeopathy was just as horrific, because it gave him an excuse to ignore his doctors and allow the cancer to fester.
- ekianjo 13y ago
  Jobs was never known to be a rational man.