Japanese entrepreneur Fusajiro Yamauchi has transformed his grandfather's playing card factory, Nintendo, into the leading video producer worldwide. So how did he do this? Here is his story:
Born in Kyoto, Fusajiro Yamauchi is the son of a playing card manufacturer family. When he was five years old, his father abandoned them and Fusajiro Yamauchi was raised by his maternal grandparents. After graduating high school in Kyoto, Fusajiro Yamauchi worked in a weapons factory throughout the war. After the war, he studied law in Waseda and married Michiko Inaba, who came from a prominent Samurai family. When Fusajiro Yamauchi's grandfather, who was the matchmaker for this marriage, suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in 1948, he handed over the management of Nintendo's playing card factory to his grandson.
Fusajiro Yamauchi, who went to a very tight new organization in the company, gave way to almost all of the executive staff. Changing the company's name to NintendoKaruta (Nintendo Playing Cards) in 1951, the young Fusajiro Yamauchi brought together the scattered production, modernized it, and refurbished the firm's headquarters. Fusajiro Yamauchi signed a contract with Disney Corporation to print popular Disney figures on the reverse of playing cards, becoming the first Japanese toy manufacturer to enter into a licensing agreement with an American company.
Nintendo Co., Ltd. is a Japanese multinational video game company headquartered in Kyoto, Japan. It develops video games and video game consoles. Nintendo was founded in 1889 as Nintendo Karuta[c] by craftsman Fusajiro Yamauchi and originally produced handmade hanafuda playing cards. After venturing into various lines of business during the 1960s and acquiring a legal status as a public company, Nintendo distributed its first console, the Color TV-Game, in 1977. It gained international recognition with the release of Donkey Kong in 1981 and the Nintendo Entertainment System and Super Mario Bros. in 1985.
After that, Fusajiro Yamauchi was unsuccessful in many attempts to open new business areas for his firm. He provided the necessary money by turning his firm into a joint stock company.
Fusajiro Yamauchi concentrated on the entertainment industry in the late 60's. In 1970 he released the device called "Ultra Hand". What this entertainment device was expected to do was that you could take the gifts in the pool by operating the lever. 1.2 million of these devices were sold. A periscope-like device called the "ultrascope" that could be looked beyond the corner was followed by the first electronic game consisting of a beam-powered beam rifle, in which solar cells acted as a target.
Despite his success with shooting ranges, Fusajiro Yamauchi was in search of the product that would bring Nintendo worldwide fame. When the first video games were released in the US in the mid-70s, Japanese entrepreneur Fusajiro Yamauchi purchased a license for the Color TV 6 game, which was able to sell approximately 1 million units. However, because the cumbersome size of these gadgets annoyed Fusajiro Yamauchi, he asked his technicians to develop an electronic game tool about the size of a pocket calculator. The result was the keyless video game device called the "Famicom", named after the combination of the words "family" and "computer" in 1983. After several functional difficulties, this tool has achieved unprecedented success, forcing all competitors to withdraw from the video game industry.
Fusajiro Yamauchi also took over the head of the research and development division in 1984. He formed groups of programmers and engineers who developed new video games in constant and direct competition. Although Fusajiro Yamauchi admitted that he never played with video, he was the only one who decided which games Nintendo would release. Not only did his luck help in doing this, he also had a great intuition about it. Before 1984, it broke new ground. As early as 1980/81, one of its engineers, Sigeru Miyamoto, had invented Mario, a small lump-nosed dwarf in a suit, for Nintendo's first successful game, "Donkey Kong." Three years later, he put his sidekick Luigi next to Mario and created a hit game called "Super Mario World".
Fusajiro Yamauchi published his own Nintendo magazine in 1989, which at great expense promoted his companies' new games and announced their imminent release. A mix between a color magazine and a public relations brochure, the benefit of this publication lay in connecting customers to Nintendo. Reviews of these products have never been heard. By 1991, Nintendo had sold approximately 70 million units of its eight Mario games. With only close to 1,000 employees, the company's turnover increased from $86 million (1987) to over $1 billion (1991).