Howard Lincoln is the chief executive and part owner of the Seattle Mariners baseball team, which is majority owned by Hiroshi Yamauchi. In August 2004, Yamauchi's shares were transferred to Nintendo.

Lincoln is a former lawyer with Nintendo of America. Lincoln did legal work in 1981 for the company, and also served as its Senior Vice President. Howard Lincoln is best known as a lawyer at Nintendo for his defense of the videogame industry during the joint hearings in the early 1990s on video game violence.

Recently, Howard Lincoln had a few words to say about Nintendo's DS system at E3 2004. "First of all, I thought they did a marvelous job. It was a great press conference, and Reggie, our new marketing executive, I thought did a tremendous job. This Nintendo DS looks spectacular. It has so many functions, and the way it was presented today was very effective in getting all those features out — the wireless feature, the touchpad feature, the dual-screen feature, one screen in 3D, the other in 2D. So many things that developers can focus on, and so it's not just an add-on product, it's a completely new product, a completely new category," said Lincoln.