Hiroshi Yamauchi

Yamauchi took over his family's playing-card firm, Nintendo, in 1949 at 22 and, after failed ventures from taxis to instant rice, steered it into toys and video games. His rule was that hardware should be cheap and the games decisive, so he backed internal designers such as Shigeru Miyamoto and kept tight control over which third-party games reached the Famicom and NES. He died in 2013.