Hiroshi Yamauchi

Hiroshi Yamauchi was born in Kyoto in 1927 and raised largely by his grandparents after his father abandoned the family, an upbringing that left him proud, wary, and unsentimental. In 1949, at just twenty-two, he took over Nintendo when his grandfather suffered a stroke, inheriting a company that had made hanafuda playing cards since 1889. He immediately fired every manager loyal to the old regime, signaling a half-century of one-man rule.

Yamauchi spent the 1960s hunting for a business bigger than cards, chasing failed ventures in taxis, instant rice, and short-stay hotels before stumbling onto his real fortune: toys and, eventually, electronics. He had a gambler's instinct for products and, more importantly, for people. He promoted a maintenance engineer named Gunpei Yokoi, hired a young art-school graduate named Shigeru Miyamoto, and gave both the room to invent.

The payoff was staggering. The Game & Watch handhelds and the arcade smash Donkey Kong funded the 1983 Family Computer, or Famicom, which launched in America as the Nintendo Entertainment System and single-handedly revived a home console market that had collapsed after Atari's crash. Yamauchi's iron control over cartridge manufacturing and his strict licensing terms let Nintendo dominate an entire generation, followed by the Super Famicom, the Nintendo 64, and the GameCube.

His signature was ruthless conviction: he never played video games himself, yet trusted his gut on which would sell, and he prized designers over marketers. He could be brutal and mercurial, but he protected his creative people fiercely. In a characteristic gesture, he personally bought the Seattle Mariners baseball team in 1992 to strengthen Nintendo's American ties.

He stepped down in 2002, hand-picking Satoru Iwata as his successor and declining a lavish pension. When he died in 2013, Nintendo had grown from a card shop into a company that had defined childhood for hundreds of millions, its fortunes built on his singular, stubborn bet that play was serious business.