Ask Iwata: Words of Wisdom from Satoru Iwata, Nintendo's Legendary CEO

by Satoru Iwata

If you force yourself to study things that have no bearing on the world around you, the material will have no way of sinking in. So, rather than waste your time, it makes far more sense to prioritize the things that you truly enjoy, whatever speaks to you.

lots of other ways that programming informs management style. For example, when simplifying and resolving complicated problems that have several layers, my experience in programming is incredibly useful. Analyzing problems is about breaking things down into discrete elements, while generating hypotheses for how to do things so that everything comes together. When programmers find a problem, they come up with a handful of hypotheses and weigh their merits, in a process that repeats daily. And so, when I confront a complicated problem, my legs are ready to carry the load. After so many rounds of trial and error I trust the process, like someone who’s been lifting weights every day.

A while back, I went on record saying “Programmers should never say no.” When you’re making games, if a programmer says, “That’s impossible,” it not only puts the brakes on a valuable idea but makes it harder for the next idea to come. If programmers only focus on things that are easy to program, they’ll never break the mold and come up with fascinating ideas.

The best bet, both on the individual level and the corporate level, is to take stock of your abilities and assign priority to minimize regret.

good idea is something that solves multiple problems in a flash.” This is something that Shigeru Miyamoto taught me at Nintendo about making games. For him, the phrase functions as a kind of creed of game design, but I see the idea as extending beyond games and being universally applicable. When you’re making something, whatever it may be, you’re always going to have the problem of “if I do this, I can’t do that.” Up against a given problem, you’ll have some choices that will make things better and others that will make things worse, but when designing a product, you’ll never find yourself in the ideal circumstance of having just one problem to solve. It’s more likely you’ll have problems everywhere you look! This doesn’t apply just to products, but to organizations and interpersonal relationships as well.

Back when I was president of HAL Laboratory, Miyamoto would call me up occasionally, and what do you think was the first thing he would say? “I got it, Iwata.” When Miyamoto said, “I got it,” he meant he had an idea for the game that we were making together, but specifically, he meant, “This idea will take out three or four of the big problems that are bugging us.”

A single breakthrough that will make this thing better, and that thing better. This is the definition of a good idea, and having one will move the project forward, closer to your goal.

if you only think within that framework, you’ll move along at the same pace as everybody else and will lack a competitive edge. However, if you can find a way of combining your resources to great effect, especially in novel ways that have been overlooked, value compounds.

On that occasion, for whatever the reason, I shared my work philosophy with him. And you know what? I don’t think that what I told him then has changed, all these years later. “It makes me really happy when people enjoy my work. This could mean gamers, or maybe friends, or maybe the companies we work with, but what interests me is helping people to enjoy themselves. Seeing the people around me looking pleased is what keeps me going.” That’s the gist of what I said. Looking back, I’m not sure what possessed me to be so open with somebody I’d known for just over a year and wasn’t especially close to. I mean, it wouldn’t be so crazy to say this kind of thing to an old friend, but I was talking like this guy had been my mentor for twenty years at least—because he made me feel that way. What I’ll truly never forget is how Itoi said to me, once I had finished talking, “I feel the same.” That’s when I realized, “Oh, that’s what made this work. We approach so many things in entirely different ways, have totally different personalities, and have taken different paths, but in a fascinating case of synchronicity, we have the same work philosophy.”

One way of defining a genius is “a person who can endlessly continue doing things that other people might dislike or easily grow tired of and be unable to continue.” I think that’s what we mean when we say “genius”—not giving up on your ideas, letting them have all the space they need. It may be exhausting, or it may perhaps be rewarding, but in any case it certainly isn’t easy. For a person who can do these things, however, it also isn’t torture. Those who think of it as torture will never surpass those who don’t see it as torture. That’s the essence of genius. Those who can persevere without thinking that they’re suffering, and thereby discover valuable things, are able to derive happiness from that alone.

Lots of people flick on the television without any thought the second they get home. The reason they turn on the television even when they don’t have any specific show in mind is the confidence that once they’re home, as long as they press the power button on the remote, something will happen, which feels better than doing nothing. I think this is the main reason why television assumed such a presence in our lives.

In that sense, if a form of entertainment has an interactive element, I believe it shouldn’t be restricted by the boundaries of traditional video games. Unless games can explore genres and themes that have been overlooked, we can’t expect the actual number of people who enjoy them to increase. Hence our attempt, with the Nintendo DS, to expand the gaming population by proactively incorporating themes that had not been explored by the games of the past.

think the people of the world today have experienced far too many different things for us to be able to create games where the experience is fully formed without your input and the end result is satisfying. As you experience more and more different things, the desire for novel forms of entertainment grows ever stronger. If we tried to account for all these wants and needs, a game console would never come together.

combined.” Today’s games tend not to revolve around one interesting feature, but complicated combinations. This is what makes them unsatisfying. That’s what happens when the design is based on the idea of “more, more, more.”

In my view, the online games of the world are unfairly biased toward the strong. It takes the bad luck of a hundred or a thousand players to make a single player happy. Of course, I don’t mean to dismiss these platforms wholesale, but as long as they retain this element, things will never expand beyond a certain level. As fun as it might look from the outside, most people will drag their heels at the entrance. There has to be another way. I’ve spent so many years trying to figure out how to make these online games a place where parents can feel comfortable encouraging their kids to play, and how to create a world where harassment is not an issue.

A video game is interesting when you can have fun simply watching someone play.

His talent and his drive to learn meant he was always getting stronger, but he stayed modest, supporting and encouraging and uplifting other people. When he stepped in to fix a problem, he joined the project as a new member of the team, taking great care not to step on anybody’s toes or dishearten anyone involved. This is a really amazing thing to be able to do.

he truly excelled at reading other people’s programs and solving problems. This enabled him to fix or rewrite code with ease. I think this must have been due to his powers of inference, and how he genuinely enjoyed reading a program and figuring out what the programmer was trying to do based on the way it was written. It wasn’t so much a drive to learn as an enjoyment of the learning process.

where you started with a theme that then gave shape to an idea, was something that he had come up with on his own. Whereas I tend to think in terms of how people will physically or emotionally respond, starting a project from ideas like “This sort of thing will probably make people feel this way” or “People will love it if we do this,” Iwata’s projects were based more on concrete themes. In this case, he realized the power of language like “brain training,” that people feel uneasy if you say their brain needs exercise, and that proposing steps to keep their brain from atrophying would be a source of motivation, which he took as his starting point for planning. He didn’t brood over hazy ideas, but was constantly searching for themes with catalytic potential. Same goes for when he was developing new hardware.