RIP Hiroshi Yamauchi "Editor’s note: Hiroshi Yamauchi, the visionary former president of Nintendo, passed away on September 19 at the age of 85. Yamauchi was notoriously private; he rarely made public appearances or gave interviews. One of the few people who could claim to have been close with him is Henk Rogers, a game industry pioneer who moved to Japan in the late 1970s and started a publisher called Bullet-Proof Software. Rogers, now managing director of The Tetris Company, struck up what would become a lengthy friendship with Yamauchi. One day [circa 1985], my wife showed me an article in a Japanese magazine that said that Nintendo’s president Hiroshi Yamauchi played Go, a Japanese board game. Coincidentally, someone had sent me a Go game for the Commodore 64. The C64 had the same CPU as Nintendo’s Famicom (NES), a 6502. I sent Mr. Yamauchi a fax on a Tuesday, telling him I could make a Go game for the Famicom and that I would like to meet him before I left for the States that Saturday. Henk Rogers. Image: Blue Planet Foundation I got a reply on Wednesday saying that Mr. Yamauchi would meet me on Thursday. Nintendo had told the top PC game companies, including Square, Enix and my company Bullet-Proof Software, that they could not make Nintendo games. But I had managed to get an audience with the man himself. “I cannot give you any programmers,” he said. “I don’t need programmers,” I said. “I need money.” “How much?” “30,000,000 yen,” I said, about $300,000. It was the biggest number I could think up on the spot. He reached across the table, shook my hand, and we had a deal. It was that quick. Mr. Yamauchi never beat around the bush. He made his decisions quickly, and they were always final. Nine months later, I was ready. I had found the C64 Go programmer in England and convinced him to come to Japan to work on the project. We added a cute interface, with little ninjas moving the Go stones, to entertain the Nintendo consumer. Yamauchi played the game once. Or I should say that he told his underling, who was holding the controller, where he wanted to put his moves. Yamauchi had never held a Nintendo controller in his hands before. He easily defeated the program, and said that it was not strong enough for Nintendo. No amount of explaining how it was a miracle that I got his 8-bit computer to play Go at all was going to change his mind. In the end, I asked if I could publish it. “What about my money?” he said. “I’ll pay you 100 yen for every copy I sell.” Again he shook my hand. I had just become a Nintendo publisher. I had many meetings with Yamauchi after that. I always scheduled them to be his last appointment for the day, so that we could play Go afterwards. During business meetings there were always underlings in the room, but when we played Go, it was just me and him. I may have been the only person in the industry who had a one-on-one relationship with Yamauchi. All of the Nintendo executives treated me like a foreign dignitary. I got most-favored-nation status, being able to deliver the gold-master of a game after the deadline and still make Christmas, for example. I liked him. He liked me. We were friends. I did many deals with Nintendo, some with Yamauchi and some with Nintendo of America’s president. I published Tetris on Famicom in Japan and brought Nintendo Tetris for Game Boy. Some people say that Tetris made Game Boy, and some people say Game Boy made Tetris. I think both are true, and the deal kind of made our companies best friends forever. One of my favorite memories of Yamauchi happened on board an airplane. I was flying coach on Northwest Airlines to Seattle to check on my Redmond subsidiary. The curtain to first class opens, and in walks Yamauchi. I had no idea he was even on the plane. He walked over and made a joke about the lousy service. He called the airline “Northworst.” We laughed. He had a sense of humor. One day, later in the 1980s, the owner of the game publisher Epyx called me up and told me he was about to sell his color handheld game machine to Sega, and was wondering if he should not show it to Nintendo first. I did not sleep for three days as I set up meetings between Epyx and Nintendo’s Japanese and U.S. branches. I met the Epyx team at the airport and got briefed on the technical specifications of the machine in the limo from Osaka airport to Nintendo’s office in Kyoto. Yamauchi would not sign an NDA. Epyx caved and we showed him the hardware anyway. After about a 30-minute explanation, Yamauchi said, “No.” I asked him why. He said, “price-point and battery life.” I said that Nintendo could put all of the chips in the machine into one or two, reducing the cost. I said that Nintendo could use rechargeable batteries. But once Yamauchi said no, he never changed his mind. Epyx ended up selling the system to Atari, which called it the Lynx. Years later, Sony and Nintendo were supposed to be working together. Sony was going to make a CD drive for the Super Famicom. They had a contract, but something went wrong. Nintendo stopped talking to Sony, and Sony’s engineers were in limbo without Nintendo’s cooperation on the interface. Sony guys asked me to find out what was going on. In between games of Go, I talked to Yamauchi about Sony. The issue was that according to the contract, Sony could make and sell CD-ROM games without buying them from Nintendo. Nintendo wanted a monopoly on manufacturing games for its hardware. I told Sony that there was no mending the relationship. The Sony team decided to make their own hardware, calling it PlayStation. Yamauchi was as sharp as anyone I had ever met. He ran his company like he played Go, never giving up a single point. I realized quickly that even though he was my friend, he was never going to give me anything. I had to take it, and in doing so earn his respect. It was how he played the game. In the end, Yamauchi became something of a recluse. I stopped being a Nintendo publisher and did not see Yamauchi in the last 10 years of his life. In fact, I’m not sure anyone did, besides his family and his domestic help. I looked for him at the weddings of both of his granddaughters, but he had stopped flying, “for health reasons.” I wish I could have seen him one more time. He was my mentor, although I knew I would never be like him. There will never be another Yamauchi in the game industry. Goodbye Mr. Yamauchi. You will always be my friend."
Posted on: Sun, 06 Oct 2013 22:07:21 +0000
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