Hiroshi Yamauchi, a towering figure in the history of video game company Nintendo, passed away on Thursday in his native Japan. The technology innovator was 85 and succumbed to complications caused by pneumonia, according to a report from The Telegraph.

Yamauchi was Nintendo’s CEO for over 50 years, from 1949 to 2002. He took over the company – a family business – at 22, and immediately brought Nintendo into the gaming realm, though not the one it is known for today. Initially under Yamauchi’s reign, Nintendo was an unsuccessful board game and toy developer, though the businessman struck gold when he decided that the company should try its hand at arcade games.

That spark of creation led to games like Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros., titles that are still recognizable today for the iconic characters they introduced to gamers everywhere. Nintendo’s arcade games were so successful, in fact, that Yamauchi decided to shift the entire focus of the company in a video-game-oriented direction.

The next step was home entertainment video game consoles, a market that Nintendo entered in 1983 with the Nintendo Entertainment System (or NES). The platform made Nintendo the stars of the video game industry practically overnight, selling 60 million units and bringing to the forefront high-quality games that continued the company’s early pattern of unorthodox and unforgettable characters (like a villainous gorilla, for example, or a pair of Italian plumbers).

Yamauchi was a smart businessman and a brilliant marketer, but he was never Nintendo’s prime innovator. That title belonged to a game developer and designer named Shigeru Miyamoto, who was behind the creation of both Mario and Donkey Kong, as well as another bulletproof gaming franchise (The Legend of Zelda) and a console that allowed Nintendo to revolutionize gaming after its 2006 release (the Nintendo Wii). Yamauchi often claimed that he didn’t understand video games, but his decision to leave the development and creativity to a core group of talent at the Nintendo offices or to outside gaming developers allowed the company to stay profitable and popular over the years. Nintendo and its consoles were never known for game quantity, but always had the edge on competitors when it came to the sheer quality of exclusive titles.

Yamauchi stepped down in 2002, shortly after the release of the Nintendo Gamecube, which had the unfavorable task of going up against Sony’s Playstation 2 and Microsoft’s Xbox. The Gamecube era suffered as a result, but Yamauchi’s successor – an out-of-family appointee named Satoru Iwata, who has helped Nintendo revitalize itself for another age of gaming.