Visionary Nintendo President Yamauchi Dies

First time accepted submitter trickstyhobbit writes "Former Nintendo president and majority stockholder Hiroshi Yamauchi has died. He was president of the company for over 50 years and saw the development of the NES, SNES, Nintendo 64, and GameCube among other devices." His career at Nintendo is worth reading about.

Re:slight correction.

[CastrTroy]

Yeah, PlayStation got a lot of attention for using discs, because it meant they could have actual recorded audio tracks and lots of shiny looking cutscenes. But those characteristics really don't make a game that enjoyable. I still miss the fast load times of cartridges. Haven't played Wii U, but it seems that Nintendo has always put good load times ahead of "ooooh shiny". The Gamecube used smaller disks, and many games had almost no noticeable load times. Meanwhile, everyone was waiting minutes for things to load on PS2 and XBox. The first party titles for Wii also had great load times. It's not impossible to have quick load times on a disc based system. I don't know why so many developers don't pay attention to this aspect.

Re:slight correction.

[Chris Mattern]

And I don't think anybody has forgotten Goldeneye 007 on the 64.

Re:slight correction.

[Psyborgue]

I have a Wii U. I haven't really noticed a huge difference between load times on disk versus the external USB2 hdd. From what I've read, the transfer rate is comparable and most game data is sequential. For most first party games (Nintendo land, NSMBU, Pikmin 3) the loading times been fantastic. Third party games have been good as well (such as Rayman Legends), with the possible exception of Lego City Undercover (off the hdd) where the load times are noticeably bad.

Re:Very intuitive

[Anonymous Coward]

Gunpei Yokoi had a "window seat" by that time, due to the failure of the Virtual Boy.

For those that don't know what a "window seat" is, it's what the Japanese do with older, well-respected company men who fuck up a major project and lose the company money. They're grateful for the good times, respectful of experience, and not about to let another project go down the drain. So instead of firing the manager of the failed project, they give him a nice office somewhere away from where real work is being done, and where he can't fail again. A "window seat".

Gunpei Yokoi had a good string of successes: the "grabber" toy he was first promoted to management for, several game projects, including Metroid and Kid Icarus, and the Game Boy. Then he had the Virtual Boy. Then he had a "window seat".

His death was unfortunate, though. "Window seats" aren't always permanent, and I'm sure within a short time he would've probably gotten another chance at a big project, or maybe come up with something new. Instead, he was killed by a bus while changing a flat tire on the side of the road. There's no telling what cool stuff we lost that day.

Re:Cheats!

[Known Nutter]

Every time someone posts the Konami code, you can tell whether they played alone or with a friend. Those with a buddy have SELECT in their head before START...