Nintendo boss a gamer first, manager second
Satoru Iwata, chief executive of Nintendo: b Sapporo, Japan, December 6, 1959; m Kayoko; d Kyoto, Japan, July 11, 2015, aged 55.
CHIEF executives of Japanese corporations – traditionally sobersuited, reticent and highly conservative – do not usually talk about fun.
Satoru Iwata, the chief executive of Nintendo, was different. He was a video gamer first, manager second. And his message about his products was simple.
‘‘Games are meant to be just one thing,’’ he said. ‘‘Fun. Fun for everyone.’’
His emphasis on ‘‘everyone’’ was not accidental. The products he helped to design and launch – including the Nintendo DS console and the Wii – were designed to appeal to the widest possible section of society, old as well as young, and were for a time highly successful.
He knew that he operated in a world of ruthless competition from rivals including Sony’s PlayStation and Microsoft’s Xbox.
The arrival of the smartphone further changed gaming in ways to which he and Nintendo struggled to adapt.
Iwata’s response to problems was distinctive. When sales fell he took a significant pay cut. Even after he became president he would join teams working on a new game if deadlines were tight, helping with software coding while ‘‘living on the developer’s diet of chips, pizza and rice balls, and working through the night’’.
He once remarked: ‘‘On my business card, I am a corporate president. In my mind, I am a game developer. But in my heart, I am a gamer.’’
Iwata was the first non-member of the Yamauchi family to run the century-old company – established in 1889 to manufacture playing cards.
Still in his early 40s, he was considered remarkably young to reach such a position in Japanese business. His love of gaming had developed as a technology-obsessed young man, born in the northern Japanese city of Sapporo in 1959.
He took apart the early computers he was given and managed to create a baseball game on his calculator at school.
‘‘I think my life course was set,’’ he said.
While an engineering and computer science student at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, he began working for a company called HAL and designed his first commercial game, Super Billiards, in 1983.
His parents initially disapproved and did not consider it to be a proper job. However, by the 1990s Iwata and HAL were working successfully with Kyotobased Nintendo on games including Tournament Golf and Pokemon. In 2000 Nintendo hired him as its head of corporate planning and then, to his astonishment, he was chosen to lead the company in 2002, in succession to Hiroshi Yamauchi, who had run it for half a century.
While Iwata himself was typical of the young Japanese males who had dominated gaming, he knew he had to broaden the products’ appeal.
The Nintendo DS and Wii consoles were designed to be easy to use and sociable for families – Iwata himself had a wife, Kayoko, but no children.
‘‘I really thought that we needed to attract new players to games, and persuade those who had quit playing to take it up again,’’ he told The Times in an interview in 2009.
‘‘When we started to announce our basic strategy, a lot of people questioned it. ‘Games are for kids and young men. Not for women or senior citizens’.’’
The Wii eventually sold more than 100 million units.
Iwata said that he was always looking for what he called ‘‘blue oceans’’ of new customers, not the ‘‘bloody red oceans’’ where competition was fierce. Soon, he claimed gleefully to be ‘‘swimming in a clear blue sea teeming with women, pensioners and couch potatoes’’.
However, impressive early profits from the sales of Nintendo DS and Wii consoles had been replaced by losses – of NZ$300 million announced in 2014.
‘‘No matter what great product you come up with, people get bored,’’ he said. ‘‘I feel like a chef cooking for a king who’s full.’’
He continued to design games to be played on Nintendo’s own hardware, while also spearheading plans to enable popular games like Super Mario to appear on smartphones and tablets. Nintendo began to return to profit this year.
Iwata had also spotted another trend, steering the company towards health products. He had earlier pioneered a ‘‘brain-training’’ game – based on traditional maths and language puzzles – which sold 20 million copies. He insisted that the marketing for the Wii should boast of promoting personal fitness.
Last year, he promised a product that was to be a kind of electronic thimble placed on a finger to check blood flow. Iwata was developing these plans, ironically, just as his own health worsened.