Hiroshi Yamauchi

Hiroshi Yamauchi was the third president of Nintendo, taking over the family business in 1949 at the young age of 21. He dropped out of Waseda University to assume control after his grandfather suffered a stroke. He is widely credited with the hard-nosed, transformation of Nintendo from a local playing card company into a global video game leader.

While not the original founder of the playing card business, Hiroshi Yamauchi is the architect of the modern, electronic Nintendo. After taking over in 1949, he quickly realized the playing card market had limited growth potential. He famously visited the United States in the 1950s and was shocked to see that the world's largest playing card company operated out of a small, uninspiring office. Convinced that cards were a dead end, he immediately diversified Nintendo into a chaotic array of businesses: taxi services (Daiya), a love hotel chain, a TV network, and even instant rice. All of these failed. Finally, he found success in the 1960s and 70s with electronic toys (like the Ultra Hand) and arcade games, largely driven by the clever of his engineer Gunpei Yokoi. Under his famously hard-nosed, top-down leadership, Nintendo released the Famicom (NES), the Game Boy, and the Super Nintendo (SNES). He possessed an uncanny ability to identify talent, famously hiring a young artist named Shigeru Miyamoto who would go on to create Mario and Zelda. Yamauchi ruled Nintendo with an iron fist until 2002, handling the company through the volatile birth of the console industry and retiring as one of the richest men in Japan.