I really love the ending of this -- the idea that even if the people you looked up to turn out to be flawed (as they all will), you can still love their work and the impact they made. So, everyone bitching about Orson Scott Card's personal beliefs and boycotting his movie...well, one's political beliefs and one's game/book/movie/etc.-making ability are usually not related, and one can suck as a person while making amazing things, so yeah.
The Big Picture: Memorium
- Thread starter MovieBob
- Start date
Good to see the man got a good memorium on this site.
I have to admit, the lack of comments on this site in regards to his death was pretty depressing. If just a little insulting.
Especially when he was responsible for reviving the gaming industry way back when.
I have to admit, the lack of comments on this site in regards to his death was pretty depressing. If just a little insulting.
Especially when he was responsible for reviving the gaming industry way back when.
But for many people in that decade that was all but true.Aardvaarkman said:
Computer gaming if experiences from those very people were to go by involved a good in depth knowledge of the system, coupled with command codes, and no guarantee that the thing would work.
That is not something that the average consumer would bother about, and considering how Atari shat themselves to high heaven with the videogame genre in general, it would simply become a passing fad for the North American audience.
Not to mention that after Nintendo hit the scene in regards to home console gaming, they were a monopoly in every sense of the word.
It was either their way, or the high way, don't like it? go cry in a corner tough luck. The Nintendo we see now with Iwata, was nothing like the Nintendo back then when Yamauchi was in charge. He was indeed a ruthless business man.
Just look around the gaming sphere and see how many people have stated that they started out their first gaming experience on an NES, SNES, or N64 (in my case anyway).
PC gaming while doing well, wasn't all that mainstream. Or at the very least as mainstream as consoles have made videogames. That evidence is still here today. GTA V on a pure console release made $1 billion in 3 days.
Not only that, the crash was limited mostly to the idea of domestic consoles. Arcades didn't get as big a dip as the console industry did, and the infancy of personal computers was still experimenting with gaming just fine.Hargrimm said:
But you know Bob. If he has to mention nintendo, he also has to point out how Mario is the most perfect game ever in ALL of its iteration and how Nintendo is the ultimate god of Gaming and we should pay tribute in blood.
That SAID... still in agreement with the rest of the sentiment here (if I thought MovieBob was all drivel I'd have stopped listening to him long ago). Great people are still people. Mistakes can be made by anyone and deification of someone is the most sure-fire way of getting disappointed.
And Thomas Edison was certainly aspiring to become Nyarlathotep.
I think the reason that Mr. Yamauchi's death didn't get so much media attention here in the U.S. is because his influence went against our firmly-held fantasy that his "type" isn't necessary- that, if you're creative enough and smart enough and ambitious enough, you don't need the likes of him to make your dreams happen. That's why we venerated Jobs so highly, because Apple was basically (thought of as) "his baby", and his fingerprint was on pretty much everything the company did. (I could make a pithy comment here about him being the charismatic leader of the Apple Cult, but in the interest of civil discourse, I'll decline.) That romantic vision requires us to disregard the fact that a lot of the Miyamotos in the world need a Yamauchi to help them grasp that first rung, to get those ideas out the door.
For those of us who are actually Mariners fans, it was a huge contribution. Had he not stepped in and bought the team, we wouldn't have baseball in Seattle anymore. While I'm grateful for all the things Mister Yamauchi brought about by his running of Nintendo, I'm many times more grateful for his keeping baseball in Seattle at a time when things looked bleakest.emeraldrafael said:
In that same vain, you could say that he has also had a major impact on American baseball, considering the ever growing numbers of Japanese baseball players we see coming to the US.
Speaking as a man who has lived in Japan and worked for a Japanese company for nearly ten years, I am dubious just how pivotal Yamauchi was in all of this. The Japanese power structure commands an almost Godlike respect for company presidents and CEOs, regardless of their business acumen or decision-making ability. The company lives and dies by the whims of the president, and those same people are often given to making bad, often seemingly-random decisions. Certainly it was a bold move for Yamauchi to restructure Nintendo as a video game company but it probably didn't take a genius to see that playing cards, even at that time, weren't going to be big money makers for much longer.
I'd venture that, yeah, a lot of good ideas probably saw the light of day because of Yamauchi's go-ahead, but there are probably dozens, maybe hundreds of really great ideas that died in the board room because Yamauchi, for whatever reason, personally disliked it.
It's strange to me that a person who hated video games would be so revered by the gaming community. We're talking about a guy that, by the way, also never graduated college and inherited his company through no effort of his own.
Japanese companies are all the same. The president takes the credit for all the good ideas and decisions, but no doubt about it there is always some peon near the bottom actually coming up with those ideas and struggling to convince the president it's the right move. The idea that Yamauchi was some genius just because somebody else managed to convince him that video games would be big some day is ridiculous.
I'd venture that, yeah, a lot of good ideas probably saw the light of day because of Yamauchi's go-ahead, but there are probably dozens, maybe hundreds of really great ideas that died in the board room because Yamauchi, for whatever reason, personally disliked it.
It's strange to me that a person who hated video games would be so revered by the gaming community. We're talking about a guy that, by the way, also never graduated college and inherited his company through no effort of his own.
Japanese companies are all the same. The president takes the credit for all the good ideas and decisions, but no doubt about it there is always some peon near the bottom actually coming up with those ideas and struggling to convince the president it's the right move. The idea that Yamauchi was some genius just because somebody else managed to convince him that video games would be big some day is ridiculous.
It's pretty disrespectful to put your book ad following a supposed tribute to a person's passing. I'm not saying you're wrong but the fact you wouldn't cut out your ad to your book even when paying respects is down right disgusting. You don't go to funerals and try to sell stuff so why would you try to sell a book after talking bout someone's passing?
Wow, very nice, I had no idea who he was. I guess im guilty of thinking Yamamoto is the end all be all when it came to Nintendo. Bob has an excellent point, while I don't play Nintendo anymore is hard not to notice there influence on the medium. Nintendo is the company every other company strives to be, tries to surpass. May Yamaguchi find peace and fortune in the next life 
Also LOLS!!! Visionaries! Talk about a terrible show, why don't you do a show about that horrible drek, or M.A.S.K.
Also LOLS!!! Visionaries! Talk about a terrible show, why don't you do a show about that horrible drek, or M.A.S.K.
I wonder if Bob picked up on the irony of his piece? Also can we really keep calling Shigeru Miyamoto a genius creator? He wasn't thought of anything new since Pikmin in 2001. Most creators would be fired if they wanted come up with a new IP in 12 years.
That was a very nice tribute here, Bob. It's so easy to forget that video game production is a team effort, and as much as we celebrate the auteurs who think up the stuff we like, there still has to be someone who signs off to invest in it, if they believe in the project's success. As for not venerating or vilifying the guys who make the stuff we like, I'd like to add George Lucas to that list. Yes, some decisions he made weren't all that great, and some paid off like gangbusters, but I'm just so sick of all the hate thrown at him for the prequels, or selling to Disney, or just anything in recent memory. He's still human, and so are we, but he accomplished more than most of us have, so we must keep that in mind when thinking of the brains behind our favorite passtimes.
captcha: Ford Owns Work
Ford. Oy, you wanna talk about a guy who's vilified after the fact...
captcha: Ford Owns Work
Ford. Oy, you wanna talk about a guy who's vilified after the fact...
You make the horrible assumption that DOOM is the only legacy of computer gaming. There's a very, very big reason why Computer RPGs are called that. They grew and were developed completely parallel to console RPGs and in fact predate them. And saving without passwords is also something that was on the PC way earlier than Zelda, as well. PCs and Arcades had joysticks before the Nintendo 64, so analogue sticks isn't an invention, just an expansion of a gaming feature that already existed. So... you're doing precisely the same kind of worshipping Bob brought up by attributing everything that happened on gaming in the last 30 years to Nintendo. They pioneered in CONSOLES, but not in the whole history of gaming everywhere.j-e-f-f-e-r-s said:
In the same video:
"Don't deify people"
and
"Yamauchi-sama"
mfw the honorific "-sama" is used to address gods and those equated to gods
"Don't deify people"
and
"Yamauchi-sama"
mfw the honorific "-sama" is used to address gods and those equated to gods
ActRaiser for the SNES. It's really good, you should find a way to play it. It's like a mixture of Sim City and Ghosts 'n Goblins with a good mixture of RPG elements. It's like the 90s equal of Dragon Commander, it did so much so well that it wasn't as well heard of because it was too ambitious.wolf_isthebest said: