[moe.ron]

Hiroshi Yamauchi, Who Helped Drive Nintendo Into Dominance, Dies at 85

TOKYO — Hiroshi Yamauchi, who transformed his great-grandfather’s playing-card company, Nintendo, into a global video game powerhouse, died on Thursday in Kyoto, Japan. He was 85.

The cause was complications of pneumonia, the company said.

Mr. Yamauchi, who led Nintendo from 1949 to 2002, was Japan’s most unlikely high-tech success story. Named president of the family business at 22, he steered Nintendo into board games, light-emitting toy guns and baseball pitching machines — fruitless forays that he later attributed to a “lack of imagination” — before the company arrived at arcade games.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/20/bu...t-85.html?_r=0