Satoru Iwata

• 1. Introduction

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  Satoru Iwata walked onto the stage at E3 in 2005 and lifted the Wii above his head, so the audience could see for themselves how small and light it was. It was a fitting gesture for the man who ran Nintendo as its fourth president while still thinking like a programmer. Iwata was born in 1959, and he spent his early career writing games long before he managed anyone who made them. How does a teenager who wrote his own games end up in charge of Nintendo? Why would he steer that company away from the race for the most powerful hardware? And what happens to a strategy built on surprise when the surprises stop landing? The answers begin with a teenager and a calculator.

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• 2. Sapporo Tinkerer

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  In the Sapporo subway, a young Iwata kept coming back to a simple numeric game called Game 31 until he had mastered it. His father worked as a prefectural official. Through middle and high school, Iwata showed a knack for leadership, serving at different times as class president, student council president, and club president. His first brush with computing came in middle school, on a demo machine that connected over telephone lines.

  In 1974 he bought an HP-65, the first programmable calculator, paying with money from a dish-washing job plus extra allowance from his father. He entered Hokkaido Sapporo South High School in April 1975. During his junior year he began writing games of his own, such as Volleyball and Missile Attack, which ran on a calculator he shared with schoolmates.

  A Commodore PET became his first computer in 1978, and he took it apart simply to understand how it worked. Its processor, a MOS 6502, was close to the chip Nintendo later used in the NES, the console he would one day write games for. In April 1978 he was admitted to the Tokyo Institute of Technology to study computer science. Tomohiko Uematsu, an engineering professor, observed that Iwata wrote programs faster and more accurately than any of his other students.

  Alongside his studies, Iwata worked as one of several unpaid interns at Commodore Japan, helping head engineer Yash Terakura with technical and software tasks. He wanted to be near computers and to learn details the public could not easily find. Terakura later became his mentor and taught him hardware engineering to complement his software skills. Iwata and some friends rented an apartment in Akihabara and formed a club for writing games. He often showed his creations to the computer department at the Seibu department store, and by 1980 a group of employees there invited him to join their company, HAL Laboratory.

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• 3. HAL Laboratory

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  In 1980, HAL Laboratory took Iwata on as a part-time programmer while he was still at university. One of its first creations was a peripheral that let older computers display graphics for games. With it, Iwata and his colleagues built games that he later described as "straight rip-offs of Namco's Rally-X, Galaxian, and others". HAL went on to become the first company to hold a license with Namco for developing games.

  After graduating in 1982, Iwata joined HAL full time as its fifth employee and its only programmer. Around then his father was elected mayor of Muroran. The family did not approve of his career choice, and his father did not speak to him for six months after he joined HAL.

  In 1983, Iwata became HAL's coordinator of software production and traveled to Kyoto himself to ask Nintendo for permission to make games for its new Nintendo Entertainment System. Nintendo agreed. His first commercially published game was Joust for the NES, a port of the 1982 arcade title. He also worked on Balloon Fight, NES Open Tournament Golf, EarthBound, and the Kirby games.

  NES Open Tournament Golf shows how he worked. Nintendo approached several developers, and all declined, doubting that so much data could fit on a cartridge. Iwata "recklessly" volunteered, then invented his own data compression method to squeeze in all 18 courses. HAL faced a similar wall with F-1 Race, because the NES hardware did not initially support parallax scrolling, so the team had to program it themselves.

  His skill earned him high regard among programmers and players, and he often worked through weekends and holidays out of sheer enthusiasm. By 1993, HAL was close to bankruptcy, and Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi insisted that Iwata take over as its president. HAL carried a debt of ¥1.5 billion, and with help from Nintendo, Iwata stabilized its finances within six years. Having no management experience, he read books on the subject and sought advice from others.

  Pokémon also passed through his hands, though he was not yet a Nintendo employee. For Pokémon Gold and Silver, released for the Game Boy Color in November 1999, he created a set of compression tools for the graphics. For Pokémon Stadium on the Nintendo 64, he served as a go-between for Game Freak and Nintendo. He read the original code of Pokémon Red and Green and ported its battle system into the new game in just one week.

  Tsunekazu Ishihara, president of The Pokémon Company, credited Iwata as instrumental in bringing Pokémon to Western markets. While running HAL, Iwata drew up the localization plan after studying the code for Red and Green. Teruki Murakawa completed the work, and Western releases arrived two years after the Japanese ones. Iwata also helped Masahiro Sakurai build Super Smash Bros. for the Nintendo 64. Then in 2000, the company that had pulled him into HAL's top job brought him in directly, as head of corporate planning with a seat on its board.

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• 4. Opening the Windows

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  On the 24th of May 2002, Hiroshi Yamauchi retired after running Nintendo since 1949, and Iwata took his place with Yamauchi's blessing. Nintendo had been founded in 1889, and Iwata was the first president with no tie to the Yamauchi family by blood or marriage. Yamauchi left him with one request, that Nintendo "give birth to wholly new ideas and create hardware which reflects that ideal. And make software that adheres to that same standard."

  The GameCube was struggling against Sony's PlayStation 2 and Microsoft's Xbox, both of which outsold it. Online gaming was taking off, and Nintendo had not yet entered that arena. Iwata answered cautiously: "We're not negative toward the idea of going online. We're just practical." He also cultivated a relationship with Capcom that improved the GameCube's appeal. In a 2002 interview he said the industry was becoming too exclusive, and he wanted hardware and games for every kind of player rather than the best possible graphics.

  One of his first acts was to meet directly with Nintendo's 40 department heads and 150 other employees. Yamauchi, by contrast, rarely met staff and gave a single annual speech. Shigeru Miyamoto called the earlier atmosphere "stuffy" and said Iwata "improved the ventilation". Iwata knew the title of president would not guarantee obedience, so he tried to connect with people personally. When employees disagreed, he told them to pursue their own idea over his, explaining that "creators only improve themselves by taking risks".

  Iwata also brought numbers into decisions. Yamauchi had relied on intuition and experience, while Iwata arrived with hypotheses backed by data. He promoted Miyamoto, Genyo Takeda, Yoshihiro Mori, and Shinji Hatano to representative directors, giving them the same board rank as his own. The programmer in him never went away. Soon after becoming president, he assigned himself to a HAL team working on Super Smash Bros. Melee for the GameCube.

  He kept up outside friendships too. In 1998 his friend Shigesato Itoi asked him, one month before the 6th of June launch of Hobonichi, to arrange a website and technical systems. Iwata agreed, became the company's IT manager, and still held that title in 2007 while running Nintendo full time.

  In September 2006, Iwata began the interview series Iwata Asks, inspired by his curiosity about how other developers think. The conversations were full of jokes and laughter, and they showed a normally secretive Nintendo willing to discuss its inner workings. Earlier in his presidency he had skipped media appearances unless new hardware was being announced, preferring to spend the time programming. In 2011 he helped launch Nintendo Direct, online presentations open to everyone that revealed upcoming games outside the usual industry channels.

  The Directs were quirky and funny, a sharp contrast to the serious tone of Sony and Microsoft. One featured a mock battle between Iwata and Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé, staged to show Mii characters arriving in Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U. Fans turned moments into memes. These included his phrase "please understand", used when announcing delays, the habit of adding "Iwata laughs" to forum posts, and a pre-recorded E3 2012 clip of him staring silently at a bunch of bananas to promote Donkey Kong. Iwata liked talking with reporters, and he prepared stories in advance to entertain them, chatting casually even when time ran short.

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• 5. Two Screens and a Remote

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  In a March 2004 interview, Iwata declared, "Games have come to a dead end." He argued that developers spent far too much effort on core gamers and would not turn a profit unless they served the average player. The year before, in his keynote at the 2003 Tokyo Game Show, he had pointed to declining interest in video games. A year-long analysis at his request concluded that pushing hardware was not the best way to promote games, so Nintendo chose to focus on software.

  A major reorganization followed in 2004, with Iwata consolidating departments that Yamauchi had created. In 2005 he started a "User Expansion Project", inviting employees who normally had nothing to do with game development to propose new games. Iwata called his approach a "blue ocean" strategy. Rather than compete on technical specifications, Nintendo would draw on his developer instincts to make novel, entertaining hardware and games.

  The first big test was the Nintendo DS, which replaced the Game Boy Advance. The two-screen idea came from Yamauchi before he retired, and Miyamoto suggested the touchscreen and then spearheaded development. Counting later versions, the DS sold more than 154 million units by September 2014, making it the second best-selling console of all time. In June 2004, Iwata sought a meeting with Dr. Ryuta Kawashima about a game for non-gamers. It became Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day!, released in May 2005.

  Iwata personally oversaw Brain Age, even skipping a public appearance on the 2nd of December, the day the DS launched in Japan. Miyamoto backed the effort and sent his protege Kouichi Kawamoto to help. The series sold over 30 million copies by December 2008 and is partly credited with launching the DS's popularity.

  The DS Lite arrived in March 2006 in Japan and three months later worldwide, with brighter screens and a slimmer body. It sold nearly 94 million units. Surveys showed households often shared a single DS, so Iwata aimed for one per person. The DSi, whose "i" stood for a single individual, added two cameras, SD card support, an audio reader, and the Nintendo DSi Shop. These models came roughly 18 months apart instead of the usual five years. Iwata thought a slow price drop over five years quietly punished people who bought at launch.

  The Wii began in conversations among Iwata, Miyamoto, and Takeda in the first half of 2003. Encouraged by Yamauchi, Iwata pushed for something revolutionary and told Takeda to go off the tech roadmap. The guiding premise was that "a Mom has to like it." Iwata challenged engineers to make the console no thicker than three DVD cases stacked together, and they managed it. Takeda's team also cut power consumption while matching the GameCube's performance.

  Iwata proposed abandoning the typical controller to make play more accessible. Miyamoto led the controller design, and after six months and dozens of scrapped prototypes, Takeda found a CMOS sensor that became the remote's core. Adding accelerometers gave them motion controls. The console was codenamed "Revolution" in an E3 2004 teaser, matching Iwata's goal of sparking a revolution in gaming. The remote itself stayed hidden until the Tokyo Game Show in September 2005, and Iwata insisted on calling it a "remote" rather than a controller, to stress that anyone could use it.

  The Wii popularized motion-controlled games and nearly doubled Nintendo's stock price. By the end of the 2009 fiscal year, Nintendo posted record net sales of ¥1.8 trillion (US$18.7 billion) and profit of ¥279 billion (US$2.8 billion). Barron's named Iwata among the world's top 30 CEOs from 2007 to 2009. That peak would not hold. By 2015, net sales had fallen to ¥549 billion (US$4.6 billion).

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• 6. Lean Years

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  On the 29th of July 2011, Nintendo's stock fell 12 percent after weak sales of the Nintendo 3DS, the handheld that showed stereoscopic 3D without special accessories. The console's price dropped in August from US$250 to US$170, and sales kept missing expectations. Iwata admitted in 2014 that he had misread the market and failed to account for changing lifestyles since the Wii launched. He had kept pushing family-oriented games even as their popularity waned.

  The Wii U went on sale in November 2012 at a price below its production cost, with Nintendo counting on software sales to recover the losses. HD graphics, absent from the original Wii, strained development teams and delayed games. Forbes writer Paul Tassi argued that Nintendo could have studied how Microsoft and Sony handled their own move to HD. The Wii U became Nintendo's slowest-selling platform, at 9.5 million units by June 2015. Miyamoto blamed public misunderstanding of the concept, while Iwata conceded it had failed as the Wii's successor.

  Mitsushige Akino of Ichiyoshi Asset Management suggested that Iwata should resign after the back-to-back disappointments. Iwata took a different kind of responsibility. In 2010, Nintendo revealed his base salary of ¥68 million (US$770,000), which rose to ¥187 million (US$2.11 million) with performance bonuses. Miyamoto earned a ¥100 million salary (US$1.13 million). Iwata voluntarily halved his pay in 2011 and again in 2014 as an apology for poor sales, while other board members took cuts of 20-30 percent. The gesture also protected employees from layoffs.

  In 2012, Nintendo recorded its first operating loss since entering the video game business more than 30 years earlier. Losses continued for two more years, and the company returned to profit at the end of the 2015 fiscal year. Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, along with Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U, drove that recovery.

  In June 2013, Iwata added the role of Nintendo of America CEO. One early decision was to drop large E3 press conferences in favor of several smaller events, each aimed at a particular audience. During a trip to Tokyo in late 2013, he sketched an idea for physical toys that could connect to Nintendo's games. That sketch became the Amiibo line, which launched less than a year later. More than 6 million figures were sold by the end of 2014, roughly a month after launch. By March 2016, figures and cards together topped 64 million units.

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• 7. Beyond the Console

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  At E3 2009, Iwata revealed the Wii Vitality Sensor, an add-on that measured pulse and fed that data into relaxation products. It followed the Wii Fit series, which Miyamoto conceived and which came to symbolize Nintendo's focus on products that improved quality of life. Iwata saw the sensor as a continuation of his blue ocean thinking. He argued that motion controls were turning into a "red ocean", where too many companies would crowd in and squeeze profits. A prototype tested poorly, and by 2013 Nintendo had postponed the sensor indefinitely.

  In January 2014, Iwata unveiled a ten-year strategy built on quality-of-life products aimed at a market outside video games. Working with Dr. Yasuyoshi Watanabe and ResMed, Nintendo announced a fatigue and sleep sensor in October 2014. Unlike the Vitality Sensor, it was meant to be a standalone product that required no wearing. A United States release was planned for March 2016, but Nintendo formally discontinued the device by February 2016. Tatsumi Kimishima said research into such products would go on. Later projects are seen as heirs to the idea, including the Nintendo Switch, Pokémon Go, Pokémon Sleep, and the exercise game Ring Fit Adventure.

  Mobile games were a harder question. After Apple's App Store took off in early 2010, Iwata called Apple the "enemy of the future" that July. The following year, he said Nintendo would "cease to be Nintendo" if it moved into mobile, fearing that games there would sacrifice quality to turn a profit. His view shifted slowly. In a March 2014 message to shareholders, he wrote, "... I believe that the era has ended when people play all kinds of games only on dedicated gaming systems."

  Investors and analysts kept urging a change. Yoshihisa Toyosaki, president of Architect Grand Design Inc., said that "Nintendo is out of touch". In March 2015, Iwata finally committed part of Nintendo's focus to mobile, forming a landmark partnership with the provider DeNA to publish games. It broke with the old model of using console exclusives to sell hardware. Iwata promised that Nintendo characters would not be used carelessly, and that the aim was to reach as many people as possible rather than to maximize income. He still criticized common free-to-play games, which he called "free-to-start", saying they could not support a "long-lasting relationship with Nintendo's customers".

  In his final months, Iwata oversaw the Nintendo Switch as its head developer, concentrating on the technical side. In a February 2017 interview with Time, Miyamoto said he believed Iwata wanted the system to be portable and to let people communicate with one another.

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• 8. Illness and Legacy

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  On the 5th of June 2014, Nintendo announced that Iwata would skip E3 for medical reasons. In a message to shareholders on the 24th of June, he explained that he had undergone surgery the previous week to remove a tumor in his bile duct, found during a routine physical exam. After about four months of recovery, he returned to work in October, having lost a noticeable amount of weight. His first public appearance was in a Nintendo Direct on the 5th of November, where he looked "gaunt and pale". He took it in stride, and in June 2015 he updated his own Mii to show his slimmer self.

  On the 28th of January 2015, a high fever, suspected to be influenza, forced the postponement of a shareholder meeting. After attending another shareholder meeting on the 26th of June, he became ill again and went into the hospital. Even there, he worked from bed on his laptop and gave Tsunekazu Ishihara feedback on Pokémon Go, which he had helped develop since 2013. Iwata died of complications from the tumor on the 11th of July 2015, at the age of 55. His wife, Kayoko, survived him. Nintendo announced his death the next day, and Pokémon Go was publicly revealed two months later.

  On the 13th of July, flags at Nintendo's headquarters were lowered to half-staff, and its regional offices observed a day of silence on social media. Fans built memorials around the world, including at the Japanese Embassy in Moscow and the Nintendo World Store in Manhattan. Shuhei Yoshida of SCE Worldwide Studios said, "I pray that Mr. Iwata, who contributed so much to the development of the gaming industry, rests in peace." A photograph of a rainbow over Nintendo's Kyoto headquarters spread online and was dubbed "the Rainbow Road to heaven", after a Mario Kart stage.

  Buddhist funeral services took place in Kyoto on the 16th and the 17th of July. Despite stormy weather from Typhoon Nangka, an estimated 4,100 people came to pay respects, including Fils-Aimé, Miyamoto, Takeda, and Iwata's close friend Masahiro Sakurai. His ashes were buried at an undisclosed place in Kyoto. Miyamoto and Takeda ran the company together for a time, and on the 14th of September Nintendo named Tatsumi Kimishima, head of its Human Resources Division, as the fifth president.

  People called Iwata a "gentle revolutionary", since he grew the market by reaching new players instead of fighting Microsoft and Sony head-on. Chris Kohler of Wired wrote that "thanks to Nintendo's Satoru Iwata, we're all gamers now." The opening of his "Heart of a Gamer" speech at GDC 2005 is regarded as the essence of who he was. Critics did fault his stubbornness about mobile. Reggie Fils-Aimé predicted, "... it will be years before his impact on both Nintendo and the full video game industry will be fully appreciated."

  Honors followed. He was posthumously and unanimously given the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2015 Golden Joystick Awards, and again at the 2016 DICE Awards. At the 2016 Game Developers Choice Awards, David Hellman, an artist on Braid, presented a short animated film in his memory. In October 2015, a fan-made Amiibo of Iwata's Mii sold on eBay for US$1,900, with proceeds going to the Child's Play charity. Hobonichi published a book of Iwata Asks excerpts and interviews with his friends in July 2019, and Viz Media released it in North America as Ask Iwata on the 13th of April 2021.

  Nintendo's games carry quieter tributes. The credits of Star Fox Zero end with "This game is dedicated to our wingman who fell in battle." In The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, a character who closely resembles Iwata sends the player up Satori Mountain to find a spirit called "Satori", widely thought to be a tribute. In September 2017, modders found that the Nintendo Switch firmware hid an emulated version of Golf, the NES game Iwata programmed. It could be reached by waving the Joy-Con controllers the way he gestured in Nintendo Directs, with the system clock set to the 11th of July.

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