Top 66 Satoru Iwata Quotes

If you want to make short-term profits from the stock price, then I am a very bad president. But I don’t think I’m so bad for maximizing the long-term value of Nintendo.

We believe a truly new kind of game entertainment will not be realized unless there is a new way to connect a player to his game.

The term ‘innovative’ or ‘innovation’ is often vague or ambiguous. But in our definition, innovation means to make something which people think impossible possible.

We really want to change the structure of home entertainment.

Needless to say, nobody is born an avid gamer.

The advantage for Nintendo is that we always try to do things that other companies don’t try to do. That is something that the general public appreciates.

Sometimes, ideas are like good wine in that they just need time.

We really must recover our financial performance and take Nintendo back into the position in the marketplace where it is well appreciated.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

We wanted people to remember the name as soon as they heard it. When people become so accustomed to the Wii name, nobody is going to say it’s a strange name, just like nobody is going to say that Google is a strange name or IKEA is a strange name today.

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

As soon as we showcased the Wii in 2006, people immediately understood. At that E3 show, I was up on the stage with other Nintendo staff playing Wii Tennis, and I could hear the excitement behind me.

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

For me, I actually found that it would have been more frightening to take the conventional path.

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.

People will buy hardware just to buy a single game if the game is really compelling.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

It’s not part of our culture to even think about outright purchasing a third-party developer.

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.

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.

The brand new user interfaces that Nintendo invented often faced skeptical views before a hardware launch but wound up becoming de facto industry standards.

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.

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.

The approach to make more gorgeous-looking graphics… to have the horsepower, to have much faster processing – they don’t do anything to ask nongamers to play with a video game.

If we don’t take an approach that looks holistically at the form a video-game platform should take in the future, then we’re not able to sustain Nintendo 10 years down the road.

Nintendo is an entertainment company, but I think we need to broaden the definition of entertainment.

I always and strictly tell Nintendo employees never to use the term ‘success’ to describe our own performance.

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.

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.

I personally am a user of iPhones and iPods.

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

I read blogs quite a bit.

In general, no engineer hates higher performance.

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.

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.

Nintendo’s mission is to try to make people happy, to try to make people smile.

One thing about the entertainment industry – it’s not something that people need to survive.

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.

We always try to be a unique company.

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

When people saw how other people were playing Wii Sports, they could immediately understand how different the system was.

We’ve been thinking very carefully about how can we possibly communicate the real value and the attraction of Nintendo 3DS. The conclusion was that there is no other way than to let as many people as possible to actually see it.

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.

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.

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.

I’m not interested in offering software for free of charge. That’s because I myself am one of the game developers who, in the future, wants to make efforts so the value of the software will be appreciated by the consumers.

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

Video games are meant to be just one thing: Fun! Fun for everyone.