Definitely Gunpei Yokoi, even Shigeru Miyamoto said that Yokoi was is teacher and mentor.
So Gunpei was really important for nintendo.

If it wasn't for Yokoi's "Extending Hand", Nintendo would probably still be making playing cards and running love hotels.

Malstrom was right. We're a bunch of lunatic Game God worshipers.

pokemon saving gameboy???

How does a 20M selling game save a 100M selling handheld???

It's like if you said smash brothers saved the Wii.... loved game by a big chunk... but not even close to changing the market repartition of consoles...

I never understood how he got fired. Sure, Virtual Boy was a mistake, but come on.

Those were the days of the Yamauchi regime, trust me he may have given the go ahead for Nintendo to enter gaming but he was a real dictator of the industry, failure in eastern companies it seems is a black mark against you and they'd rather press the issue then see if you can redeem yourself, just look at Sakaguchi with Spirits With In, Kuturagi with the PS3 launch and ironically enough Yamauchi himself for reference. No matter who you are you'll answer for big mistakes only Yamauchi is lucky he owns the company that gave him the boot as their president.

This is a toss up.

The Game Boy was not the only handheld of its generation. It was actually the least technologically advanced. But battery life and the right software propelled it to the top.

The D-pad was not the only mode of control. It actually is an evolution of the control cross that Yokoi used on the G&W.

Pokemon is not the only monster collector series. But it is the most prevalent and the longest lasting.

So I will let someone else choose first and be happy with the leftover. You cannot go wrong either way.

Mike from Morgantown

Yokoi: it was his genius that saw the opportunities of using 'mature' (read: old and cheap) technology to pioneer the market that Nintendo came to dominate  (beginning with the Game & Watch) and a philosophy that, when Nintendo has followed it (e.g. G&W, NES, GameBoy, DS, Wii) has made the company the force it's been throughout its existence.

It is truly a shame that his career had to be marred by the Virtual Boy when he, ironically, followed his own philosophy to his doom. (That being said, Mario Clash is still an amazing game and I'm glad the VB existed if only for that.)

But Yamauchi wasn't fired. He retired due to his age. And if he didn't have someone like Iwata, he'd probably still be President of Nintendo.

He didn't even trust his son-in-law enough to give him power over the entire company. And after he gave his position to Iwata, he was still Chairman of the Board of Directors. Then 3 years later he left because he felt the company was in good hands, and didn't even accept his retirement pension because he thought Nintendo could make better use of it.

His retirement was from the board of directors in 2005, Iwata took over from him as President in 2002 after he was made to step down when the rest of the top brass felt it's time for a new direction as well as his age, he remained a chairman on the board for 3 years until 2005 when he retired from old age.

Not exactly. He decided to step down on his own.

One day he called Iwata to his office and started talking to him about business and the industry in general. It was a very long talk.
Iwata initially thought Yamauchi was firing him. But it was actually to give him his position because he thought Iwata was good enough for such a position.

Yamauchi's authority knew no limits. No one could tell him what to do. Absolutely no one. All of those who even dared to do that got thrown away.