Hiroshi Yamauchi was a very harsh man in some regards (at least most would agree that he was blunt) but the way he built Nintendo is admirable. He knew what many managers don’t, that you need to find talented people that you can trust and have a hands off approach to their work if you want to scale and that there is probably not a single person or division in your company that deserves all the credit. He had by all accounts equal respect for Gunpei Yokoi who built a lot of good hardware, Satoru Iwata who built a lot of good software and Shigeru Myamoto who created a lot of good content.

I know that Iwata took the company to great heights after Yamauchi stepped down but sometimes I worry that as time goes by Nintendo will lose what made it great, which is their big picture thinking. They’re not a console company, or a game studio or a game publisher; they’re a game company and to create the best experience they sometimes need to reimagine how games are played while not looking too gimmicky. It takes a special kind of philosophy to pull that off and over time I’m afraid it’ll go away.