Hiroshi Yamauchi officiailly left Nintendo after 55 years. He was president from 1949-2002 and stayed as Board of directors for an additional 3 years, mainly to oversee the development of the DS and Wii systems and assisting his successor Satoru Iwata.

Yamauchi is widely considered the best Nintendo president of all time due to turning his great-grandfather's small card company into a video game empire, as well as greenlighting the best Nintendo games under his tenure (he saved HAL Laboratory from going bankrupt in 1993 and turned them into a second-party studio). When Yamauchi left, there was a signifncant decline in quality in terms.