back to article Hiroshi Yamauchi, bizlord who gave the world Donkey Kong, dead at 85

The man who took Nintendo from a small family business into an international megacorp has copped it, aged 85. Hiroshi Yamauchi died of pneumonia in a Japanese hospital on Thursday morning. Yamauchi stepped down as president of Nintendo in 2002, and left the board in 2005, but remained the largest individual shareholder and was …

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  1. Splodger
    Pint

    Game Over.

    RIP.

  2. ElectricFox
    Thumb Up

    He made such a long lasting cultural impact.

    1-Up

  3. Stretch

    Seems like life is NintendoHard

  4. Dan Paul

    Many enjoyable hours with the NES

    RIP, Hiroshi; great businessman to have seen the wave of video game systems and provide great engaging (addicting) games and consoles to boot. Still can't get some of the MIDI music out of my head from Mario Bros.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Many enjoyable hours with the NES

      MIDI music? It was a proper old fashioned chip tune, none of this new fangled MIDI rubbish!

  5. Frostbite

    A more fitting end would have been if he had got run over by a barrel.

    1. Charles 9
      Joke

      Oh? I'd have figured either poison mushrooms or infection from a turtle bite.

  6. Daniel B.

    RIP

    Mr. Yamauchi, your princess is in another castle!

    Someone has overlaid the Tacuba Station icon with tubes so that the station's logo looks like three SMB chomper plants. I now have the world 1-2 theme playing in my head every time I ride the subway! *dara dara dara*

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Not sure if it's true....

    but I heard that "Donkey Kong" was a mistranslation and should have been "Monkey Kong"

    AC just in case this is common knowledge and I'm demonstrating my ignorance of pop culture... :)

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Not sure if it's true....

      I would have thought that unlikely because there is a "Mo" (も) in Japanese, but there is no "D" sound in the language, so anyone translating would be unlikely to use a "D" as it's not really available to them (excepting that they do also make fairly heavy use of Romanji - the English/Western alphabet.)

      Incidentally the Japanese word for Monkey is Saru (さる), but you could spell the English word "Monkey" as a direct translation of the English into Japanese as まんき (mo-n-ki).

      That said, I know basically next to nothing about Japanese...

      1. Charles 9

        Re: Not sure if it's true....

        Just a slight pedant alert. In Japanese, when they're trying to accommodate a foreign word, they differentiate it by using an alternate phonetic alphabet: katakana (vs. the traditional hiragana you used).

        To translate the word "monkey" into katakana would be 「モンキ」, though as you say Japanese has a direct term for monkey and wouldn't need katakana.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Not sure if it's true....

          Yeah, it's a fair point, I did wonder about writing it in Katakana, but was already skiving off work too much to go and find somewhere to cut and paste it from... ;)

    2. 9Rune5

      Re: Not sure if it's true....

      http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/donkeykong.asp

      "Shigeru Miyamoto, the game's inventor and the one person who unquestionably knows the origins of the name he chose, has repeatedly affirmed that he used the word "donkey" to convey a sense of stubbornness and the name "Kong" to invoke the image of a gorilla. "

  8. Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

    Did any one explain to him...

    That he can continue if he puts another 10p in the machine?

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Gone the way of the Wii-U

    Nuff said.

    1. DaneB

      Re: Gone the way of the Wii-U

      Yep, could be an omen for what's to come for Ninty.

      RIP.

  10. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
  11. Will Godfrey Silver badge

    Seems he got a top score.

  12. ecofeco Silver badge

    End of an era

    While it seems most people remember only the home games, the real money in the early years of video games were the arcade games.

    There were a stunning breakthrough in arcade amusement. And because they (the machines) were physically bigger and better capitalized, they were able to incorporate more computing power, thus giving us better graphics and action than our poor cousin home consoles.

    Alas, those are mostly gone as well.

  13. Elmer Phud

    Today I shall wear my Donkey Kong promo t-shirt as a mark of respect.

    And stand on the roof throwing beer kegs at anyone who comes close (especially effing plumbers)

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    RIP Mr. Yamauchi

    Mr. Yamauchi, you introduced many great games to this world. Thank you for hours of entertainment. We will remember you forever. Rest in peace.

    Please feel free to leave your condolences or share a memory: http://www.eternal-contact.com/hiroshi-yamauchi/

  15. SolidSquid

    Didn't Starfox originally come from a British company who were one of the few non-Japanese businesses sub-contracted to make first party titles for the Nintendo? They made the pitch and Nintendo were so amazed that they managed to get actual 3D polygons out the hardware that they brought them in to produce the game.

    1. John 62

      Indeed, interesting history here

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argonaut_Games#History

      Seems Argonaut commissioned the SuperFX chip because, as impressive as Argonaut's software skills were, even the SNES hardware wasn't up to the task.

      [As an aside, while we're talking about add-on chips: Personally I would have preferred Virtua Racing for my MegaDrive, but my parents had already got me the hugely expensive Street Fighter II Special Champion Edition which had huge, for the time, ROM.]

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