pop & funWikipedia2002–2015 · Japan
Satoru Iwata led Nintendo by favouring clever games over raw hardware power
Satoru Iwata was a programmer who rose to run Nintendo, and he argued that games should be novel and entertaining rather than chasing the most powerful machines. He worked on EarthBound and many Kirby games at HAL Laboratory, and he rescued HAL from near bankruptcy in 1993. Becoming Nintendo's president in 2002, he oversaw the Nintendo DS and Wii, whose design drew in players who had never owned a console. Iwata was the first Nintendo president who was not related to the company's founder. He died in 2015 at the age of 55.
Console makers compete either on technical power, which gets expensive quickly, or on new kinds of play that rivals do not offer. Iwata chose the second route, aiming at families and older players who had never bought a console. That lets a company grow its audience instead of fighting over the same customers.
Iwata's strategy of widening the market instead of matching rivals on specifications helped make video games a mainstream pastime. Later hardware such as the 3DS and Wii U sold less well, and Nintendo's net sales fell by about two-thirds from 2009 to 2012, which shows how fragile that approach could be.
He was a self-declared gamer who became the public face of Nintendo through the Iwata Asks interview series and Nintendo Direct presentations.
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