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.
Satoru Iwata
Needless to say, nobody is born an avid gamer.
Video games are meant to be just one thing: Fun! Fun for everyone.
We want to create a kind of cycle where casual gamers are gradually growing up to become passionate players.
People will buy hardware just to buy a single game if the game is really compelling.
The term 'innovative' or 'innovation' is often vague or ambiguous. But in our definition, innovation means to make something which people think impossible possible.
At Nintendo, we do not run from risk. We run to it.
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.
Entertainment is there to improve people's quality of life. After your basic needs, there's entertainment.
What I believe is that Nintendo is a very unique company because it does its business by designing and introducing people to hardware and software - by integrating them, we can be unique.
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.
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.
Sometimes you are physically tired at night, but your brain is functioning too much to go to sleep. If you can have software that helps you understand how you can shift from such a tense situation to being more relaxed, then that would help.
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.
Trust your passion. Believe in your dream.
We never try to think in terms of any competitive product or company. If you do that, you just focus on a certain narrow area. Rather, we should think much more broadly.
Nintendo's mission is to try to make people happy, to try to make people smile.
It's not part of our culture to even think about outright purchasing a third-party developer.
I personally am a user of iPhones and iPods.
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.
The heart of the matter is that everybody starts video games as a beginner. Then, after going through a lot of experiences and becoming more and more fond of video games, they become the experts.
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.
One thing about the entertainment industry - it's not something that people need to survive.
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.
Many things we can't do are simply because we think we can't do them.
Nintendo has paid a great deal of attention to the dynamic of people playing video games together in the same room.
If Nintendo asks consumers to pay more money than the other platforms, then it's Nintendo's mission to provide the added value for which the people are willing to pay. In order to do that, we must remain unique and cannot be reproduced somewhere else.
People sometimes ask me what I did when I was hired at HAL. The answer is that I was a programmer. And an engineer. And a designer. And I marketed our games. I also ordered food. And I helped clean up. And, it was all great fun.
Personally, I think that users should be able to use all the functions of a console video game machine as soon as they open the box.
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.
We really must recover our financial performance and take Nintendo back into the position in the marketplace where it is well appreciated.
Here's a hypothesis I seriously believe: If there hadn't been a 'Pokemon' game, maybe the market for handheld game devices would have gone extinct.
Sometimes, ideas are like good wine in that they just need time.
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.
In general, no engineer hates higher performance.
Regardless of age, gender, or game experience, anyone can understand Wii.
Some people will say Nintendo's games are for children. But our goal is to boost the population of gamers by making games for all ages.
When the economy is strong, people tend to buy three things from the top of their wish list. But when things are bad, people often buy only the first thing on their list.
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.
Typical tech-driven companies or hardware-driven companies always lay out the so-called roadmaps when it comes to making the new hardware. So, in other words, availability of certain technologies dictates when the company is intending to make the new hardware.
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.
We are producing something people can live without. But we need to keep thinking what would make our products a priority purchase even if they are not a necessity. If we stop doing that, no matter how successful Nintendo is at the moment, things will start going wrong in no time.
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.
I don't think that free games are something new. On the PC, there have always been free games. But finding them was not always easy. With the popular products like the iPhone, now it is easier.
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.
It was very fortunate for Wii that a lot of households around the world decided to connect the Wii to the living room TV.
Having strong momentum is very important for game platform businesses. Once momentum is lost, great power is needed to change that trend.
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.
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.
It certainly makes a game better to have voice commands because it can alter how the game is played.
