I just read his interview on WIRED and he sounds so racist. So Japanese Elitist. He acted like the Japanese won WW2 literally. He called RPG's a "loser's genre". He told Steve Ballmer to suck his turkey (props to that one though).
Dude is most likely a total sociopath. Must have been terrifying to work with him. I usually say it in a joking manner, that yamauchi sent ninjas after Gunpei.... But in the back of my head Im never really sure Gunpei's death was an accident...
Although the 'wired' 'interview' 'pride' was actually a parody, which mixed in Some real quotes from Yamauchi, with a satirized script. He never told ballmer to suck his yellow balls, that part was satire. It was started by a website gamerah.com, which had put up these snippets of the supposed 'wired' interview.
The crazy thing is, he was so cartoonishly villain that its actually hard to distinguish some of the satire from the real thing.
Scary, scary man. Made a lot of enemies for nintendo.