Hiroshi Yamauchi, 1927–2013

Hiroshi Yamauchi transformed Nintendo from a flailing toy company into a video game giant, but the taciturn executive never played the electronic games that made his company world famous. “I have better things to do,” he often said.

Yamauchi came from a “prosperous but troubled” family, said the Financial Times. When he was a boy, his father eloped with his mistress and brought shame on the family. As a result, Yamauchi was only 22 when his grandfather handed him control of card-game manufacturer Nintendo—Japanese for “leave luck to heaven.” The young college dropout would go on to run the company for 52 years. Desperate to diversify, he experimented with selling instant rice, running a taxi fleet, and developing “love hotels” with hourly rates. Those efforts all flopped, but he “found his touch” by entering the toy market.

Nintendo reaped huge sales from “a succession of silly gizmos,” said NewYorker.com, including an extendable claw known as the Ultra Hand and a Love Tester that measured a couple’s “level of ardor.” Then a fortuitous meeting between Yamauchi and Nintendo engineer Gunpei Yokoi in the mid-1960s changed everything. Yokoi, who was filling in as the president’s driver, mentioned seeing a businessman playing with a calculator on his morning commute, and suggested selling a portable electronic game player. The resulting product, Game & Watch, eventually sold 43 million units, setting off Nintendo’s run of gaming success.

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It soon developed such video games as Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros., which became global smash hits, said the Los Angeles Times. In the 1990s one in three U.S. homes had a Nintendo gaming console, and the company became one of Japan’s biggest. Yamauchi’s “gruff and uncompromising” style was infamous; he “pitted employees against one another” and often dismissed years of work with a wave of his hand. That pragmatic, unemotional streak was evident in his 1992 purchase of a majority stake in the Seattle Mariners baseball team, which he admitted was solely a gesture to American consumers.

In fact, Yamauchi never watched the Mariners play a single game. “Let me put it this way,” he said, in 1992. “Baseball, well, baseball has never really interested me.”