The man who built the modern video game industry almost never picked up a controller. This episode profiles Hiroshi Yamauchi, Nintendo’s third president, from a Kyoto childhood marked by his father’s abandonment and wartime factory work, to taking over the family hanafuda card company at 21 on the condition that he be the only family member employed there, firing a cousin and then the striking veterans who protested his youth.

It follows the Disney licensing deal that sold 600,000 packs of cards in a year, the failed ventures into instant rice, taxis and hotels that pushed Nintendo toward bankruptcy, the discovery of Gunpei Yokoi playing with a mechanical claw that became the Ultra Hand, and the pivot to electronics through the Magnavox Odyssey, competing R&D departments, Donkey Kong, Game & Watch and the Famicom. The episode covers the third-party quality controls that answered the 1983 crash, the cartridge decision on the N64, the Virtual Boy failure, his estrangement from his father and later grief, his love of Go, the $75 million he put up to keep the Seattle Mariners in Seattle without ever attending a game, and his choice of Satoru Iwata over his own son as successor.

• How childhood abandonment shaped an executive’s need for absolute control
• Why the Disney card deal bypassed the gambling stigma and dominated the Japanese market
• How pitting R&D1, R&D2 and R&D3 against each other fueled innovation
• Why limiting publishers to three titles a year restored consumer trust after 1983
• What the Mariners purchase and the Iwata succession reveal about his philosophy