Top 50 Satoru Iwata Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

We really cannot forget about the existence of the avid game fans – the fans of Nintendo games.

Regardless of age, gender, or game experience, anyone can understand Wii.

Entertainment is there to improve people’s quality of life. After your basic needs, there’s entertainment.

What Nintendo will do is simply try to do our best, believing that our strategy is right.

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.

When similar products are on store shelves, price competition is inevitable. Nintendo has been trying to steer clear of that direction and create a market of our own.

I personally am a user of iPhones and iPods.

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.

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.

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.

It certainly makes a game better to have voice commands because it can alter how the game is played.

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.

At Nintendo, we do not run from risk. We run to it.

Needless to say, nobody is born an avid gamer.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For young players, classic games are brand new. For others, they are a way to feel young again.

We want to create a kind of cycle where casual gamers are gradually growing up to become passionate players.

It is challenging to communicate attractions which are hard to understand unless you actually touch and experience them yourself. This is especially so with Wii U because it has unprecedented entertainment potential.

Like any other entertainment medium, we must create an emotional response in order to succeed. Laughter, fear, joy, affection, surprise, and – most of all – accomplishment. In the end, triggering these feelings from our players is the true judgment of our work. This is the bottom line measurement of success.

Nintendo has been a very unique company because it’s not just hardware but also one of the major software publishers. Because it is in a unique position, it’s given us a unique advantage.

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.

Making games look more photorealistic is not the only means of improving the game experience. I know, on this point, I risk being misunderstood, so remember, I am a man who once programmed a baseball game with no baseball players. If anyone appreciates graphics, it’s me!

A motion-sensing controller that you hold with both hands is completely different from one that you can use with either your right or left hand.

It was very fortunate for Wii that a lot of households around the world decided to connect the Wii to the living room TV.

We really want to change the structure of home 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.

What Nintendo has to do is make software that takes advantage of the Wii MotionPlus and make efforts to make the public understand the benefits of the Wii MotionPlus controls.

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.

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.

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.

What I wanted to have happen was that people who didn’t know that Game Boy Advance and GBA are the same thing would remember Wii right away because it doesn’t need to be abbreviated.

Many things we can’t do are simply because we think we can’t do them.

We have to think of what kinds of experiences we can create that only Nintendo can create and what no other companies can create. So the result is the Nintendo 3DS.

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.

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.

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.

The DS was launched back in 2004, and sales of that machine hit a record in 2009 in the United States. That is totally different from the conventional sales pattern, in which game gear sales peak in the third year and take a downturn thereafter.

Nintendo’s approach to our work is to greatly increase the population of gamers.

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.’

We always try to be a unique company.

I think that Nintendo puts a lot more emphasis and uses the controller more than any of the other companies.

Having strong momentum is very important for game platform businesses. Once momentum is lost, great power is needed to change that trend.