johnlucas said:
Say what you will about that arrogant man the guy was a visionary. Without him the other two pillars of Nintendo (Yokoi and Miyamoto) would have never came to be. He turned a dadgum playing card company into a worldwide videogaming success. And he's right. They don't know games. Ray Kassar didn't know games either and eventually Atari got caught in a crash. Nintendo would only work with someone else if they had control and final say over end product. Nintendo learned the lesson of not overseeing and controlling their creative works and we got CD-i Zeldas. See YouTube for details. And Nintendo has too much pride to be bought out. I really think they'd prefer going out of business rather than selling out. They better not lose TOO much of that arrogant Yamauchi pride. It serves a purpose. John Lucas |
There is no doubt that Hiroshi Yamauchi had great insite into the industry and that he has been mocked for saying things which turned out to be true; consider his 2004 quote:
"I have been saying this for some time, but customers are not interested in grand games with higher-quality graphics and sound and epic stories. Only people who do not know the videogame business would advocate the release of next-generation machines when people are not interested in cutting-edge technologies."
At the time he was openly mocked by (pretty much) every "journalist" in the industry and they used it as a demonstration of how out of touch Nintendo was with consumers; they claimed that this type of thinking was why the Nintendo DS was far less powerful than the PSP which was going to lead to the eventual doom of Nintendo's handheld line. In hindsight we see just how right he was.
The main problem with Yamauchi was that (although he was usually right) he lacked tact needed to implement his vision. Most people don't understand where Nintendo's problems with third parties comes from, during the SNES generation there was far too many bad games being released which was hurting the image of the industry, and preventing the sales of good games. Yamauchi at the time wanted to reduce the quantity of bad games on the system but ended up alienating a lot of third party developers in the process; I can't find specific quotes anymore but the general gist of many of them was that third party developers were awful and took no pride in their work.
