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

by Satoru Iwata

As human beings, unless we have someone to compliment our work and enjoy what we’ve created, we’re not apt to go out on a limb.

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.

the time you spend thinking about totally random stuff is never wasted.

Putting everything together was another story, however. At the most basic level, computers depend on simple commands, but these simple things can be combined and processed into elaborate designs. That’s what makes programming fun, but also difficult.

To be specific, the Super Famicom system did not allow for us to display a large number of sprites (a technical method for displaying graphical objects on the screen) in a row. Yoshi is shaped the way he is in order to limit the number of sprites in a row when Mario is riding him. If you look at the diagrams for Yoshi, it’s easy to see that he was designed purely from a place of functionality. We made Yoshi a dinosaur not because we wanted Mario to ride a dinosaur, but because the space we had, in terms of functionality, was shaped much like a dinosaur.

One of these games had a feature I’ll never forget. An early version of WarioWare: Twisted! included something called the “record player.” The basic premise is you place the Game Boy Advance on a swivel chair, and then you spin the chair around. Sure enough, the record player in the game will spin along with the chair, and as you spin the chair faster and faster, the music in the game speeds up! I remember sitting there for hours on end, spinning the chair around. Now and then, I’d say, “This is so silly.” And yet, I found it so incredibly satisfying. “Silly” is a lofty compliment!

I remember Iwata saying is “Anything a computer can do for you should be left to a computer.” Maybe this is obvious to people who can leverage computers on a daily basis, but to me it was a revelation. Iwata often said, “People only want to do things only people can do,” and I think that he was exactly right.