Hiroshi Yamauchi

Hiroshi holding a speech about the N64 and it´s N64 Disk Drive at the Shoshinkai exhibition in Tokyo 1995.

He is the one most powerful man in the whole videogame industry!

The childhood
In 1927 Shikanojo and Kimi Yamauchi had a son, the first male Yamauchi to be born in 3 generations. When Hiroshi was only 4 years old Shikanojo abandoned him and his mother Kimi. Kimi moved in to one of her sisters and left Kimi's parents, Sekiryo and Tei to raise Hiroshi. He was told that his father was a deceitful and worthless man. Kimi's parents reared Hiroshi with an iron fist, very anxious to raise the young boy into a highly educated young man with excellent grooming and good manners. Hiroshi rebelled against his grandparents an just became more and more intractable. He disregarded Sekiryo and Tei and he grew up to be an impudent, arrogant, sturdy and debonair gentleman. He dressed in expensive, well tailored clothes and had long well manicured polished fingernails (!). Although that he inside he was sullen and bitter he never showed it to his friends. To them, Hiroshi was a happy young man full with levity and dust-dry wit. In 1940 Hiroshi was sent to preparation school in Kyoto but soon the war came....

Military School
Tei refused Hiroshi to enter the army and by sending him to military school he didn't have to either. During the war food was scarce and people often had to eat potatoes, but Hiroshi had a lunch box full rise every day. Hiroshi use this fact cleverly to get away from much of the work at the military school. One day when he sat eating he noticed how his supervisor was looking at his rice and he asked the supervisor to share it with him and in reward Hiroshi got the afternoon off. From that day on Hiroshi always carried 2 boxes of rice to work and every day he got the afternoon off!

Nintendo
When the war was over Hiroshi started study at the Waseda University and later married Michiko Inaba (NOT from the same family as Shikanojo!). When he was 21 his grandfather Sekiryo who ran Nintendo at the time died in stroke and Sekiryo wanted him to take over after him. Hiroshi agreed if certain conditions were met like that he wanted to be the only one in the family there, so that no one could question his authority. In 1949 Hiroshi Yamauchi became Nintendo's third president and has since that day guided Nintendo through it's many successful years. Although that he doesn't know much about videogames he has always made the right decisions. He can instantly say if a games is "hot" or not and he often makes the decisions wether to release a game or not all by himself (at least until 1993).

The realm of the Motherbrain
Hiroshi didn't ruled (and still does?) Nintendo very much unlike many other japanese companies. Rather than making the employees feel loyality to the group and the corporate good, Hiroshi pitted his teams and employee (often openly) at each other letting them compete against each other. Or as an employee putted it "We lived for his praise". Therefore the employees of Nintendo didn't really like him, in fact they feared him... One employee did go so far that he compared Hiroshi with the big evil boss the Motherbrain from Metroid and called Hiroshi's office for "the realm of the Motherbrain"! You can say that he is the one most powerful man in the whole videogame industry so when he holds a speech EVERYBODY listens to see what Nintendo will do next! He will resign in 2000 after 51 years as president at Nintendo.

The Family
When his father Shikanojo returned as an old man to see his son, Hiroshi refused to speak to him and he never saw his mother much either. He disregarded his father for what he had done. When Hiroshi was close to 30 his half sister which he didn't even know that he had contacted him and told him that Shikanojo had died in stroke. Hiroshi sat alone a whole day thinking about if he should go or not. Finally he decided to go and at the funeral he met his father wife and their 4 daughters that he never even knew existed! He became overwhelmed when his aunt told him how much like his father he looked and Hiroshi began wondering what else he might have inherited from Shikanojo. He began feeling sorry about that he hadn't taken the opportunity to reconcile with his father when he was still alive. The death of his father changed Hiroshi, he grieved for months and cried freely. From that day he has always made regular visits to his father's grave....