Minoru Arakawa
Minoru Arakawa ( Japanese 荒 川 實 Arakawa Minoru , born September 3, 1946 in Kyoto , Japan ) is a Japanese entrepreneur. He founded the US company Nintendo of America , and was its managing director and co-founder of Tetris Online Inc. for a long time .
Life
Minoru Arakawa was the second son of Waichiro Arakawa and Michi Ishihara. Waichiro was a manager at the Arakawa clothing company. It was said that he cared more about good relationships with customers than about profit optimization. Michi was an artist. The family was considered rich; their property took up a fifth of downtown Kyoto.
In 1964, Minoru Arakawa began studying civil engineering at Kyoto University and graduated in 1969. After moving to Boston in 1971, he went to MIT , where he completed his second master’s degree a year later . At a Christmas party in Kyoto he met the daughter of Nintendo President Hiroshi Yamauchi , Yoko Yamauchi. The two married in 1973. The small family moved to Vancouver in 1977 . In 1980, at the request of the Nintendo boss , Minoru Arakawa opened the first branch of the Japanese games company in Manhattan , which had started with playing cards and now recognized the importance of computers.
The first title that Arakawa imported from Japan to the USA and made up for the market there was the arcade computer game Radar Scope . The considerable investments made did not pay off, the console game was a flop. Of the 3,000 machines arriving from Japan with a delay of several months, only 1,000 were sold. Arakawa used the remaining funds from Nintendo of America to have a small team program and design a game that filled the remaining 2,000 consoles and better suited the US market. The result was a sensational success for the time: Donkey Kong . One of the heroes of the game was Mario - based on Mario Segale, Arakawa's landlord in New York.
Minoru Arakawa led Nintendo to success in the USA and, with the Game Boy in 1990, also in Europe. His feeling for the different cultures was crucial. In 2006, together with the Tetris inventor Alexej Pajitnow, he founded Tetris Online Inc. , which was responsible for various games for Nintendo DS , Wii , iOS and Facebook . In 2013, Arakawa retired. He lives in Honolulu .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Bloomberg - Are you a robot? Retrieved July 28, 2019 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Arakawa, Minoru |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | 荒 川 實 (Japanese) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Japanese entrepreneur |
| DATE OF BIRTH | September 3, 1946 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Kyoto , Japan |