When it came time to take a job, I had the distinction of joining the smallest company of any graduate in my class. I left to become only the fifth full-time employee of HAL, and when I told my father this, you can imagine, it was not the happiest moment in the history of my family.
— Satoru Iwata
Sometimes, ideas are like good wine in that they just need time.
First of all, I've never once been embarrassed that children have supported Nintendo. I'm proud of it. That's because children judge products based on instinct.
Trust your passion. Believe in your dream.
If the first entrant always wins the market, the Dreamcast must have won the race against the PS2, for example. There are many precedents like that in the past. The first to market is not necessarily the winner in the race.
Even before the advent of smart devices, we employed touchscreens for our games with Nintendo DS, and we also adopted accelerometers for our Wii Remotes faster than smart devices did.
In the digital world, content has the tendency to lose value, especially on smart devices. We finally found solutions to the problem. We will not merely port games developed for our dedicated systems to smart devices just as they are - we will develop brand new software which perfectly matches the play style and control mechanisms of smart devices.
The approach to make more gorgeous-looking graphics... to have the horsepower, to have much faster processing - they don't do anything to ask nongamers to play with a video game.
I believe that if we don't make moves to get people who don't play games to understand them, then the position of video games in society will never improve. Society's image of games will remain largely negative, including that stuff about playing games all the time badly damaging you or rotting your brain or whatever.
One thing about the entertainment industry - it's not something that people need to survive.
It was very fortunate for Wii that a lot of households around the world decided to connect the Wii to the living room TV.
Of course, no single entertainment device can enjoy eternal popularity.
The thing that concerns me most is that, in the digital age, if we fail to make efforts to maintain the value of our content, there is the high possibility for the value to be greatly reduced, as the history of the music industry has shown.
Third-party publishers, like everyone, face increasing risks associated with creating games, and you have to target your resources to the right places and the right platforms.
What's interesting about the 'Smash Bros.' games, is that the 'Smash Bros.' games do not represent the Nintendo characters fighting against one another: they actually represent toys of Nintendo characters getting into an imaginary battle amongst themselves.
The digital world is one that has sort of a unique characteristic, where it's a place in which it's very easy for the value of content to fall.
We really must recover our financial performance and take Nintendo back into the position in the marketplace where it is well appreciated.
In 1978, I entered the Tokyo Institute of Technology. I would have loved to study videogame programming, but nobody was teaching it then. So I went to classes on engineering and early computer science.
At Nintendo, we do not run from risk. We run to it.
We really cannot forget about the existence of the avid game fans - the fans of Nintendo games.
If we reduce the number of employees for better short-term financial results, employee morale will decrease. I sincerely doubt employees who fear that they may be laid off will be able to develop software titles that could impress people around the world.
We are trying to capture the widest possible audience all around the world. In other words, we are trying to capture the people who are even beyond the gaming population.
For us to create unique experiences that other companies cannot, the best possible option for us is to be able to develop hardware that can realize unique software experiences.
We wanted people to remember the name as soon as they heard it. When people become so accustomed to the Wii name, nobody is going to say it's a strange name, just like nobody is going to say that Google is a strange name or IKEA is a strange name today.
We really want to change the structure of home entertainment.
It's not part of our culture to even think about outright purchasing a third-party developer.
We think there is definitely a lot of use for online connectivity in creative games.
In Europe, we packed in Wii Sports with the console, so one way or another, people processed the Wii by enjoying Wii Sports. The unique, interactive nature of the game was spread thanks to the excitement from the consumer.
When we considered what to do with the graphics capability of the Wii, we put more attention and focus on the ability to create new experiences rather than the quality of the graphics.
I do not like to use the term 'Free-to-play.' I have come to realize that there is a degree of insincerity to consumers with this terminology, since so-called 'Free-to-play' should be referred to more accurately as 'Free-to-start.'
Games already pretty much have reached the point of photo-realism. Working on more intense graphics is not the only path we can take anymore. Simply relying on the sheer horsepower of the machine will not bring the industry a bright future.
One thing that we have found over the years is that video games themselves are a thing that have a tendency to be difficult for them to break out of a particular segment, or a particular group, or a particular group of people with particular interests.
On my business card, I am a corporate president. In my mind, I am a computer programmer. But in my heart, I am a gamer.
We believe a truly new kind of game entertainment will not be realized unless there is a new way to connect a player to his game.
For young players, classic games are brand new. For others, they are a way to feel young again.
What Nintendo will do is simply try to do our best, believing that our strategy is right.
For me, I actually found that it would have been more frightening to take the conventional path.
Nintendo is applying the benefits of advanced technology, but we're using it to make our machines more power-efficient, quieter, and faster to start.
If we don't take an approach that looks holistically at the form a video-game platform should take in the future, then we're not able to sustain Nintendo 10 years down the road.
Nintendo's mission is to try to make people happy, to try to make people smile.
Our approach is not to look at the successes of other people and try to repeat those successes. We don't look at the success of 'Grand Theft Auto 3' and think that maybe if we create games for older audiences will see a similar success.
I think that Nintendo puts a lot more emphasis and uses the controller more than any of the other companies.
I never think in terms of how we can compete against the other companies; rather, our primary focus is to make consumers feel the uniqueness and attractiveness of our products.
As soon as we showcased the Wii in 2006, people immediately understood. At that E3 show, I was up on the stage with other Nintendo staff playing Wii Tennis, and I could hear the excitement behind me.
Nintendo is a company of Kyoto craftsmen, and what we don't want to do is, if we know we can make something better, we don't want to leave that behind.
It's important not only to have the right timing of when the hardware is going to be released but also when we are going to be able to introduce quality software.
It certainly makes a game better to have voice commands because it can alter how the game is played.
In the time period before Wii was called Wii and we still referred to it as Revolution, no one thought it was going to succeed.
Having strong momentum is very important for game platform businesses. Once momentum is lost, great power is needed to change that trend.
