Giant maker

Yamauchi,who took over in 1949,was not a hardware man. His genius lay in recognising other peoples,and giving them the tools they needed to create something that would truly change the game. He pulled Gunpei Yokoi,the man who went on to develop the handheld GameBoy console,off the playing-card assembly line and hired Shigeru Miyamoto,the dreamer behind Zelda,Mario and Donkey Kong,who still serves as Nintendos one-man brain trust. As much as getting into the home video-game market was a happy accident a fact Yamauchi readily admitted his strategy of low-cost hardware paired with high- quality games made the Japanese company a serious contender in a business then dominated by American manufacturers,most notably Atari. Ataris implosion led to what is now called the video game crash of 1983,which almost destroyed the still-fledgling industry. It was only with the launch of Nintendos home-gaming system in 1985 that the industry regained its footing.

Of course,not all of Yamauchis instincts served him well. In the 1990s,he had a falling out with another Japanese company about profit-sharing,and that firm went its own way. Later,it launched a rival to Nintendos system the Sony PlayStation. In many ways,Nintendo has been left behind in the market it helped create; its Wii console is a distant third behind Microsofts XBox and the PlayStation. Perhaps its time for another Mario to slay Nintendos dragons.

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