During his 53-year tenure, Yamauchi transformed Nintendo from a hanafuda card-making company that had been active solely in Japan into a multibillion-dollar video game publisher and global conglomerate.
Due to his young age and total lack of management experience, most employees did not take Yamauchi seriously and resented him.
Western playing cards were still a novelty in Japan and the public associated them with Western-styled gambling games such as poker and bridge.
Most gambling activities were technically illegal by default with only the few legally sanctioned exceptions of horse racing, pachinko, and lottery.
Yamauchi's first "hit" came when he made a licensing agreement with Walt Disney in 1959 for his plastic playing cards.
The strategy succeeded and the product sold an unprecedented 600,000 units in one year, soon gracing Nintendo with the domination of the Japanese playing card market.
Some of the new areas he ventured into included a taxi company called Daiya, a love hotel with rooms rented by the hour (which he reportedly frequented),[12] and individually portioned instant rice.
With an already established distribution system into department stores for its playing cards, the transition was a natural one for Nintendo.
Yamauchi created a new department called Games and Setup, manned initially by only Yokoi and another employee who looked after the finances and was situated in a warehouse in Kyoto for the purpose of research and development.
Yokoi utilized his degree in engineering by developing what is now known as electric toys such as the Love Tester and a light gun using solar cells for targets.
After hiring several Sharp Electronics employees, Nintendo launched the Color TV-Game 6 in Japan, which was followed by several revisions and updates of this series.
Yamauchi had Nintendo expand into the United States to take advantage of the growing American arcade market.
Although the Game & Watch was successful, Yamauchi wanted something that was cheap enough that most could buy it yet unique enough so that it would dominate the market for as long as possible.
Yamauchi was so confident with the Famicom that he promised an electronics company one million unit orders within two years.
It was released a year later in North America and in 1992 in Europe, in both regions as the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES).
[citation needed] A 1995 article in Next Generation reported that Yamauchi, though 68 years old, "remains very much in charge" of Nintendo and called him "The most feared and respected man in the videogame industry".
[citation needed] In the fiscal year ending 31 March 1995, Nintendo achieved revenues of 416 billion yen.
[11] A year later, he announced that he would retire by 2000, regardless of the lack of a good successor, and in particular wanted to end his career with the launch of the 64DD.
[19] In 1999, Yamauchi and Nintendo announced their intentions to work on a new system with an IBM Gekko processor and Matsushita DVD technology codenamed Dolphin.
Yamauchi touted the GameCube as a machine designed exclusively to be a video game console, opting not to include media playback.
This emphasis towards "performance only" and the creation of hardware that would allow developers to "easily create games" is what Yamauchi believed would set the GameCube apart from its competitors.
He left the board on 29 June 2005, due to his age, and because he believed that he was leaving the company in good hands.
Yamauchi also refused to accept his retirement pension, which was reported to be around $9 to $14 million, believing that Nintendo could put it to better use.
[citation needed] He donated the majority of the 7.5 billion yen to build a new cancer treatment center in Kyoto.
[11] Henk Rogers, founder of The Tetris Company, characterized Yamauchi's leadership style as autocratic, stating that "If you ever worked with him and you disagreed with him in a meeting, you were fired.
However, following the strong support and sentiments of the people of Seattle and press the commissioner formally approved the deal, under the condition that Yamauchi had less than 50% of the vote.