Miyamoto Praises Yamauchi's Lead
Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto has said more lovely things about NCL's former president, Hiroshi Yamauchi.
In a recent lecture at the Tokyo University, Shigeru Miyamoto covered a number of topics with students. One of the more interesting comments made by Miyamoto was regarding former NCL boss, Hiroshi Yamauchi.
I tend to give okays to projects which have a lot of personality behind them, or which reflect the color of the project team. Mr. Yamauchi, who retired and serves as an advisor now, told me "Devote the money to the things people aren't doing now." Right now Nintendo's holding something like 800 billion yen in cash.
Nintendo was ranked the highest among companies with cash back in the bubble days, but now other companies are getting the other end of the bubble and most of them are in bad trouble. Nintendo is not. That's thanks to Yamauchi. Yamauchi always told us "Take the money you got from entertainment and put it right back into entertainment!" I'm really glad we didn't go for a diversified strategy back then.
NCL's new president Satoru Iwata, appointed last year, is widely believed to be modernising Nintendo's strategy in light of GameCube's shortcomings and the company's next home games console - but we'd be surprised if he hasn't also taken note of Yamauchi's characteristically tough running of Nintendo, which made loads, and loads of money.
Adam Doree
Director, Kikizo.com
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