The Nintendo Family
The Yamauchi family starts Nintendo with the founder Fusajiro Yamauchi, he was born on November 22, 1859 in Kyoto, Japan. When he gets older he passes down the business to his son in law Sekiryo Kaneda in 1929. Sekiryo has no male children, but a daughter, Kimi Yamauchi. Kimi marries Shikanojo Inaba and has a son Hiroshi, but soon after the birth of Hiroshi in November 07, 1927, Shikanojo leaves the family and Hiroshi then takes the last name Yamauchi. Hiroshi grows up mainly under his grandparents during World War 2 and has an arranged marriage with Michiko Inaba, no relation with his father. After some time, Hiroshi’s real father, Shikanojo, was on his death bed. Hiroshi never knew truly knew Shikanojo, and he resented
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He took charge of the company with an iron fist. Hiroshi during this time visited Walt Disney and saw the success they had, he struck a licensing deal with the Walt Disney Company to make cards with Disney characters on them in the 1950s. After messing around with the main focus of the company Nintendo settled on children’s toys and games. Soon after the company made their very own arcade game. The game was a skeet shooter type. It used gun type controllers to shoot at figures on the screen. This was the start of Nintendo moving into video games and the start of a major breakthrough for Hiroshi Yamauchi. Throughout this period of him bring president he has three kids and several miscarriages. Hiroshi Yamauchi through the difficult time periods in his life became very hard. This tough exterior helped him be a very powerful business man and helped him push himself through the competition. In May of 2002 Hiroshi steps down as the president of Nintendo and became a chairman on the board of directors. He holds that for three years before retiring due to old age. Then in September 19, 2013 Hiroshi passes away from problems with pneumonia at the age of 85. Hiroshi pushed the company into the modern era and made many break throughs along the way. Without the strong direction and motivation, the company may have fallen due to the many other small game companies that were being started during this time. Hiroshi Yamauchi is a pivotal point to not only Nintendo, but to gaming as a whole. Without many of his innovative ideas and pushes towards video games the early start of video games could have been a very rough patch and never get pushed as far as it has been today.