Nintendo's 'visionary' former president, who oversaw the births of Super Mario and Pokemon, has died after a career spanning more than 50 years at the helm of the world's largest computer games company.
Revered as one of the video-game industry's founding fathers, Kyoto-born Yamauchi went from university dropout to Japan's richest man as he transformed the Nintendo from traditional playing-card maker to games-console giant.
He was also the first foreigner to own a major league baseball team after acquiring the Seattle Mariners in 1992.
Nintendo, which makes Super Mario and Pokemon games as well as the Wii U home console, was founded in 1889. It made traditional playing and trading cards before venturing computer and video games.
'He’s not a hardware guy,' noted software entrepreneur Henk Rogers. 'He doesn’t understand games. He understands people and he plays people.'
A dropout of the prestigious Waseda University in Tokyo, Yamauchi’s raspy voice and tendency to speak informally in his native Kyoto dialect was rare among Japanese executives.
Rob Crossley, associate editor of Computer and Video Games magazine, told the BBC: 'This man was the president of Nintendo during the NES, the SNES, the N64 and the Gamecube - the first two were transformative pieces of electronic entertainment.'
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