Hiroshi Yamauchi, who transformed Nintendo from a maker of playing cards and board games into a global videogame giant, has died at 85.

The Associated Press reported that Yamauchi passed away of pneumonia on Thursday in a hospital in central Tokyo.

“The entire Nintendo group will carry on the spirit of Mr. Yamauchi by honoring, in our approach to entertainment, the sense of value he has taught us — that there is merit in doing what is different — and at the same time, by changing Nintendo in accordance with changing times,” said Nintendo president Satoru Iwata in a statement.

Yamauchi took over the company in 1949, when he was just 22 years old. Nintendo was founded in 1889 by his grandfather Fusajiro Yamauchi as a maker of hanafuda, traditional Japanese playing cards with images of flowers on their faces. Yamauchi dropped out of Waseda University to lead Nintendo.

“It would be a lie if I said I was enthusiastic about taking over Nintendo,” Yamauchi said in 1986, as quoted in the 2010 book A History of Nintendo. “I was young and I had mixed feelings, but in front of me I had a family business with no head and all its employees waiting to know what was going to happen to them.”

In Game Over, a 1993 book about the rise of Nintendo, writer David Sheff reported that Nintendo’s employees “resented [Yamauchi's] youth and inexperience,” and in response, Yamauchi fired “every manager… left over from his grandfather’s reign.”

Only the third president that Nintendo ever had, Yamauchi ran the company until 2002. Although the company was the premier maker of hanafuda cards, Yamauchi dreamed much bigger. In the 1950′s, he began to sell western playing cards and struck a deal with Disney to produce licensed cards with Mickey Mouse and other characters; these were a huge hit. In the 1960′s he launched Nintendo’s IPO. When sales of playing cards dropped, Yamauchi embarked on several money-losing ventures into food, taxis, even “love hotels.” When all of these failed, he re-centered Nintendo on the gaming business, introducing a line of board games. When these became popular, he expanded the company into electronic games in the 1970′s, which led to its entry into the videogame market.

In 1992, Yamauchi purchased the Seattle Mariners baseball team, a controversial move at the time.

“In Nintendo’s newest game, Hiroshi the billionaire must negotiate his way through a hostile country, avoiding the venomous Jingos and skiing past the antagonistic Moguls so that he can rescue Ken Griffey Jr. from the clutches of the Tampa Bay Baseball Task Force and save the day for the beleaguered Rain People,” Sports Illustrated wrote that year.