Hiroshi Yamauchi, credited with transforming Nintendo from a family-owned Japanese business into a global video game giant, died Thursday from pneumonia. He was 85.

Yamauchi was just 22 when he took over the family business - then a maker of playing cards - and went on to head the firm for over half a century.

It was during his tenure, in 1983, that Nintendo released a games console called the Family Computer, which laid the foundations for the modern video-game industry.

Known abroad as the Nintendo Entertainment System, the early console became an international phenomenon with the company's global success skyrocketing on the back of the legendary Super Mario series.

A string of successful game software titles followed, while the popular Game Boy hand-held console was released to popular acclaim in 1989.

Yamauchi, whose death was reported by Japanese media, was born in the ancient capital of Kyoto into a family that operated as a maker of Japanese and Western playing cards.

He was a 22-year-old student at Tokyo's Waseda University when he took over the family business in 1949.

Yamauchi started Japan's first mass production of plastic playing cards and took the company public.

After running Nintendo for 53 years, he stepped aside in 2002 as he brought in current chief Satoru Iwata.

Yamauchi was listed by Forbes magazine as Japan's richest man just five years ago, when Nintendo was flying high with the launch of the Wii and its motion-sensing controller.

Yamauchi bought the Seattle Mariners major league baseball team in 1992 when the franchise was struggling, although it was later taken over by Nintendo of America Inc.

He was ranked 13th on the latest Forbes Japan list released this year, with an estimated net worth of $US2.1 billion.

Yamauchi's death comes just two days after Eiji Toyoda, a member of Toyota's founding family who oversaw the automaker's global ascent and helped drive a revolutionary production process, died at the age of 100.

AFP/Reuters

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Calm, quiet, smooth, devastating

Oh, no!

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On the kinkometer, my kink measures as a sine wave.

A true visionary. And a man responsible for so many spin-off businesses too!

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Though I am different from you,
We were born involved in one another.

For it was not into my ear you whispered, but into my heart. It was not my lips you kissed, but my soul.

Complete surrender should not just come at moments in which one faces overwhelming odds, but in the calm when it seems one is personally in complete control of one's life.

He just knew which buttons to push.

RIP Hiroshi Yamauchi!