Evan Nabavian is the lizard king.
Hiroshi Yamauchi stories are the best.
When the late Nintendo boss couldn’t find his driver, he had one of the company’s engineers drive him to a meeting. On the way, the engineer spoke to fill the silence – the boss didn’t talk much. The engineer recalled seeing a man playing with a calculator on the train and wondered aloud about the viability of portable video games. By Yamauchi’s decree, the engineer (Gunpei Yokoi) would create the Game & Watch and in turn the Game Boy. A billion dollar idea conceived from forced conversation.
Another time, Nintendo flew some plucky British game designers to Kyoto to explain how they had finagled 3D graphics out of Nintendo hardware. Yamauchi entered the sweltering hot room in which the designers had been waiting and explained through a translator that he wanted them to show Nintendo how to make 3D games. Yamauchi only paused to ask one question, “How much do you want?” The sweaty, young game designer sitting opposite Yamauchi considered saying, “One million dollars,” but he got excited and said, “Two million dollars.” Yamauchi agreed and the meeting ended. When the designer got back to his hotel – no contract had been signed yet – his brother called to tell him that Nintendo had sent him two million dollars.
These stories are only worth telling because we know how the story ends. Hiroshi Yamauchi turned his family’s hanafuda company into a video game publisher that would revitalize an industry left for dead and create the best games ever made. (Yeah, say something.) You can measure his success in stock prices and units sold, but also in the scope of Nintendo fandom which includes none other than Thundercat.
Thundercat and pianist Ruslan Sirota uses the sound palette of classic games for a tribute to Yamauchi that sounds like a Paper Mario overture. Packed into “Bowzer’s Ballad” are hints of the charms and wonders of Nintendo’s beguilingly simple games. To real heads, the electronic keys will bring to mind hours lost in Zelda’s dungeons and aimless diversions in Mario’s courtyard. We don’t usually mourn business magnates with songs and artwork, but Yamauchi was a ruthless executive whose directive was to foster fun and creativity. It’s safe to say his philosophy transcended video games.
