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

by Satoru Iwata

When I’m really hooked on something, as long as I can figure out what got me hooked, I can take that process and apply it elsewhere as a way of drumming up interest.

When you make things for a living, your daily work is divided between things that only human beings can do and things a machine may as well do instead. This is why I’m interested, from an early stage, in creating frameworks for automating the things a machine may as well do instead. I’ve always been easily bored by menial labor. I want to have fun and focus on the things that I enjoy. I can’t imagine spending each and every day doing the same menial tasks over and over—but I’d hate to put that work on someone else.

“When a customer has too many choices, they get confused,”

"A good idea is something that solves multiple problems in a flash.”

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. Miyamoto believes that making these discoveries is the responsibility of anyone with the title of director.

These trade-offs are obvious, but if you only think within that framework, you’ll move along at the same pace as everybody else and will lack a competitive edge.

you can find a way of combining your resources to great effect, especially in novel ways that have been overlooked, value compounds. Arriving at the root cause of a problematic situation, you’ll find that several problems that appeared to have been independent issues are in fact connected at a common source, so a single measured change will affect various seemingly unconnected areas, solving multiple problems simultaneously.

A person who makes games can’t sit down with everyone who buys them and explain, “Here’s how I designed things. Here’s how to play.” Obviously that would be impossible. The product needs to be self-explanatory.

it’s all about the customer’s point of view, and Miyamoto has a way of getting there extremely early in the process. Meanwhile, I was mostly interested in how cool my programs were but had failed to consider how actual players might receive them.

Because Miyamoto is so ready to change up his perspective, he’s able to arrive at actual solutions rather than implementing stopgap measures that save one life by sacrificing another.

“Working with what we have, it would take two years to fix things up. If you don’t mind starting from scratch, we could be done in half a year.”

I may have reorganized the game from scratch, but the constituent elements had come into being during the four years when I wasn’t around. The graphics were done, and the story and soundtrack were essentially complete. So the materials were basically in place.

when you’re creating a new piece of hardware, if all it does is repackage the same old gaming experience, it won’t actually feel new, and the gaming population won’t expand. It doesn’t matter if it’s a handheld console or a home console. If you make the same old thing, it won’t have character. And if it lacks character, all you do is add to the competition.

staying the course means not having a future. If you maintain the status quo, you wind up fighting for survival, and gradually your fan base disappears. That’s the one direction I’m always trying to avoid.

When we were creating WarioWare, I remember saying all the time, “We need to do whatever Nintendo hasn’t been able to do.”

When you’re making a game, at first there are so many things you want to do, but piling on all the features you want won’t make the game superior. When you figure out exactly “what is necessary for this game,” a world of possibilities will open up. So, rather than tossing in whatever you want, it’s good to remember the creative power of paring back.

When working on a project, I’ve found that what really counts is not what you add, but what you throw away and what you decide to leave out.

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

When you’re developing new hardware, you need to create teams that span departments, but Iwata decided to nickname these groups “roundtables.” Having a name like that made the prospect of people coming together from various departments to converse agreeable for everyone involved. They may not have made it onto the organizational chart, but these spaces were defined so that human resources could easily engage with them. Giving things a name helped people to understand their roles intuitively.

Iwata didn’t read in search of hints on how to do things, but to find support for the ideas that constituted his worldview, and so that he could use books as a resource for conveying these ideas to others.

when he found something that validated what he was thinking in a book that he was reading, it strengthened his resolve. By recommending that employees read these books, he was able to explain his ideas and unify the vision of the company. This is how he put these books to use.

In his view, a facilitator was a person who ensured that meetings were productive, adding a touch of creativity where it was lacking, or focusing the conversation when there was an excess of creativity. Effectively, it meant being the producer of a meeting.

Something that Iwata and I had in common is impatience with people saying that they’re “doing all they can” when no kind of a solution has been reached. You might be doing everything you’re supposed to do, in terms of company and interpersonal responsibilities, but if nothing has been solved for those depending on you, all you’ve done is provoke their anxiety.

What makes me sad is that if I have a crazy idea over the weekend, there isn’t anybody I can tell about it on Monday morning.

One thing that stuck with me about the way Iwata salvaged EarthBound is how he started off by creating the tools he needed to fix the game. After announcing it would be done in half a year, he didn’t simply shut the door and fix the game himself. Rather, he set up systems so that the entire staff could fix the game together. I was astonished by the freshness of this approach.

Iwata also coined the phrase “Programmers should never say no,” which later became infamous. Iwata was worried that the message had taken on a life of its own and caused a lot of people grief, but obviously this was not what he had intended when he said it. Rather, he was saying something like “It’s our job to think up ways of giving ideas shape so that Itoi can feel free to share his vision openly.”

“People only want to do things only people can do,”

I’m fond of the way logic bars contradiction. When I’m faced with a new question, my first thought is, “How does my answer square with everything I’ve done up to now?”

Since way back when, my motto has been “Whenever I work with someone, I want them to say, ‘I’d love to work with you again next time.’” I’m deeply invested in making this come true. The last thing I’d want is for them to say they’d just as soon never see me again.