Chairman · Nintendo of America · b. 1940 · 1983–1994
Howard Lincoln served as Nintendo of America's senior vice president and later chairman, acting as the company's legal and legislative strategist through the console wars, the congressional video game violence hearings, and the licensing battles that cemented Nintendo's market dominance.
Lincoln joined Nintendo of America as a legal consultant in 1983 and quickly became Minoru Arakawa's most trusted executive, handling the aggressive litigation strategy that protected Nintendo's intellectual property and licensing terms throughout the NES era. He successfully sued Tengen (the Atari subsidiary that had reverse-engineered Nintendo's lockout chip) and numerous other companies attempting to publish unlicensed NES cartridges, enforcing Nintendo's quality-control system against persistent legal challenge. His courtroom work established precedents in software copyright that shaped the games industry's legal environment for the following decade. Lincoln's highest-profile moment came in 1993 when, alongside Sega of America's Bill White, he testified before US Senate committees chaired by Senators Joe Lieberman and Herb Kohl investigating violent video games. Lincoln presented Nintendo's self-regulatory approach — a content rating framework — as an alternative to government legislation, and the hearings led directly to the formation of the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) in 1994, a solution Lincoln had effectively proposed. He later became chairman of the Seattle Mariners baseball team following Nintendo's purchase of a controlling interest in the club in 1992, a deal he helped structure.