AIAS To Honor Nintendo's Lincoln, Arakawa

Officials from the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences (AIAS) have announced that the organization will honor former Nintendo of America chairman Howard Lincoln and president Minoru Arakawa with the academy's first ever Lifetime Achievement Awards. The awards will be presented to Arakawa and Lincoln by Electronic Arts' chairman and CEO Larry Probst as part of D.I.C.E. Summit 2007's Interactive Achievement Awards on February 8, 2007 at The Joint at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. According to AIAS officials, The Lifetime Achievement Award “honors those who have devoted their lives to the advancement of the interactive entertainment industry and have made significant contributions that have guided the business to the prominent position it is in today.” Arakawa, who was also the first person to be inducted into the AIAS' Hall of Fame, established Nintendo of America in 1980, and became the company's first president and held that position until his retirement in 2002. Along with Lincoln, Arakawa shifted the focus of Nintendo of America from coin-operated games to console games when the company brought Nintendo's home entertainment console from Japan as the NES. Lincoln, former chairman of Nintendo of America and current CEO of the Seattle Mariners, has been involved in the video game industry since 1981, when he was initially brought on to provide legal counsel to Nintendo. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Lincoln worked to bring video games to the mainstream and became a prominent voice of the industry in the controversial congressional video game violence hearings. "The impact of the work done by Minoru Arakawa and Howard Lincoln can still be felt today,” commented AIAS president Joseph Olin. “The creation of the licensed publishing model, quality approval for third party games and peripherals, and the fostering of innovative sales and marketing programs played a significant part of Nintendo's success, and are at the foundation of the consumer interactive entertainment business."