The Nintendo president, who has died from cancer at the age of 55, brought in a ‘blue ocean’ strategy that would lead to the industry’s most successful consoles

On my business card, I am a corporate president. In my mind, I am a game developer. But in my heart, I am a gamer.

– Satoru Iwata, speaking at the Game Developers Conference in 2005

Here is a story about Satoru Iwata. It’s just one moment from his career, but it tells us much about how he thought and why, on the news of his death, an industry is in mourning.

On 2 December 2004, Nintendo launched its DS dual-screen handheld console in Japan. Designed to appeal to what the company called “the Touch Generation”, the DS was the first big product launch for Iwata as president of the veteran video game manufacturer. This was the vanguard moment for his plan to grow the gaming population. But as the stores opened early in Tokyo and the first DS units were sold, Iwata was nowhere to be seen.

Instead, he was in the city of Sendai, visiting Prof Ryuta Kawashima. He knew his absence in Tokyo would raise eyebrows, but this outranked it. At the time Kawashima was author of a pair of popular exercise books, containing simple maths and language puzzles, that were marketed as ways to “train the brain”. Iwata thought these could be the basis for a game that would be popular with non-gamers and, after securing Kawashima’s agreement to the project in the summer of 2004, had now brought the prototype software. The two men discussed the project for hours.

Just over five months later, Brain Age: Train Your Brain In Minutes a Day! was released for the Nintendo DS. Rather than being an instant smash, Brain Age (renamed Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training in other territories) was a slow-burner, spreading by word of mouth and gradually attracting a whole new audience. The simple but personable style was charming, the daily structure of tasks was compulsive, and finding out your “brain age” at the end of exercises was fun. Over the coming years, Brain Age would sell just under 20m copies, with its sequel close behind. Iwata turned a maths game into an industry phenomenon, and he knew and cared enough about the project to see it through personally.

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It was this perspective on the games business that saw Nintendo regain its dominant market position under his leadership. After the arrival of the PlayStation in 1994, the company had been playing catch up, blindsided by Sony’s technical acumen. The N64 and GameCube were decent, successful consoles, but they fell far behind the PlayStation and its sequels in sales. When Iwata arrived, he brought with him a “blue ocean” philosophy: instead of competing with rivals like the PlayStation and Xbox on technical specs, Nintendo would explore entirely new areas of design. He thought differently from other corporate leaders in the industry, for one very important reason: Iwata learned his trade in the trenches of game development.

Born in 1959 in Hokkaido Prefecture, Japan, the young Iwata was always fascinated with technology, and as a teenager at high school would create simple games on his programmable calculator. Many years later, Iwata would reflect on how a friend’s enthusiasm for these productions had affected him. “I think it was like when members of a comedy duo find each other. When I made something, he responded. That’s how I found my first customer and awakened to the joy of making something. I often think how I would have never made video games if it weren’t for that experience.”

Iwata received his first computer, a Commodore PET, in the late 1970s – and in his thirst to understand the machine, took it apart. This would turn out to be a stroke of luck: the PET used a CPU similar to the one that would later power Nintendo’s Famicom console. By this time, Iwata had left high school and was studying computer science at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, which he juggled with a part-time gig at newly established developer HAL Laboratory. While still at college, Iwata coded his first commercial game, Super Billiards, which was published by HAL for the MSX home computer in 1983.

But by this time, the potentially industry-changing Famicom was imminent. HAL Laboratory exploited its Nintendo links, badgering the company for a chance to develop on the machine. Iwata himself visited Nintendo to find out more, believing even before he saw the console that he could program games for it.

And of course he could. Though Iwata was a HAL employee, throughout the 1980s and 1990s he also began to work for Nintendo. He was solely responsible for coding firstparty Nintendo games like Balloon Fight and NES Tournament Golf, and was credited as producer on many others.

As he gained experience of the industry, Iwata began to think of ways to make new kinds of game, however modest. One idea was to create a game that anyone could play from beginning to end, regardless of skill. Fellow HAL employee Masuhiro Sakurai designed a giant smiling puffball that inhaled his enemies, and the studio released Kirby’s Dreamland for the Game Boy – a delightful, gently challenging platformer and the debut of a beloved character.

At around the same time, HAL was in some financial trouble, and 1993 saw Iwata appointed president. Over the next seven years he brought HAL’s finances back into the black and further strengthened the company’s links with Nintendo: when Masuhiro Sakurai had the idea for an arena-battling game starring Nintendo characters, it was Iwata himself who coded the Pepsiman proof-of-concept prototype, that would go on to become the legendary Smash Bros series. All this was done under the watchful eye of the formidable Hiroshi Yamauchi, then president of Nintendo Japan.

Being close to Nintendo was good for HAL, but it would be even better for Iwata. Finally hired as a Nintendo employee in 2000 at the age of 41, he was initially made head of the corporate planning division and thrown into managing multiple large-scale projects that required global co-ordination. Nintendo was preparing to transition from N64 to Gamecube, entering another round of bruising competition with Microsoft and Sony.

In May 2002 Iwata was summoned to Hiroshi Yamauchi’s office. The older man spoke for hours about his half-century in charge of the company and, at the end, offered Iwata the job of president. The change happened soon thereafter. “Iwata has the instincts you need to succeed in this business” said Yamuachi on his departure. But perhaps the greater compliment was that Iwata was the fourth president of Nintendo in 136 years, and the first from outwith the Yamauchi family.

Within two years, Iwata repaid that faith. Despite industry doubts over the appeal of a dual-screen handheld console, the Nintendo DS was a phenomenon, going on to sell over 150m units and thriving on beautiful, accessible games like Brain Training, Advance Wars, Animal Crossing and Mario Kart DS. Nintendo had discovered that providing new ways to interact with hardware could be just as important as improving visuals. Speaking at the Game Developers Conference in 2005, Iwata said: “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! But my point is that this is just one path to improved game. We need to find others. Improvement has more than one definition.”

It was a lesson he built on with the launch of the Nintendo Wii console in 2006 – and the results were equally spectacular. Straight after the DS launch the company’s research and development division began to work on a home console that could make similar use of a non-traditional control interface to reach beyond the traditional market. The team began to experiment with motion controls, developing a controller that could react to player movement, allowing easy interaction with onscreen characters. Speaking to Business Week in 2006, Nintendo’s game design legend Shigeru Miyamato said that Iwata and he wanted to attract those members of a family who tended to stand back and watch. But they also wanted a machine that would fit in with the space and budgetary demands of the family, a cheap machine that would also play old games.

“Our goal was to come up with a machine that mums would want: easy to use, quick to start up, not a huge energy drain, and quiet while it was running,” said Miyamoto. “Rather than just picking new technology, we thought seriously about what a game console should be. Iwata wanted a console that would play every Nintendo game ever made. Mums would hate it if they had to have several consoles lying around.”

When the Wii was first revealed, the industry scoffed once again. The graphics processors were inferior to those in the latest PlayStation and Xbox machines and the Wii remote controller seemed like a gimmick. But then people started playing early titles like Wii Sports and Wii Play – they were intuitive, fun and social. Anyone could get involved. Word of mouth spread and by mid-2007, Wii had sold more units than the PS3 and Xbox 360 put together. People were holding Wii parties, and everyone who attended was going out and buying their own machine the next day. It sold over 100m units.

From here, the industry became more of a challenge. The rise of smartphones and then tablets ate into the traditional handheld console market, and the online gaming explosion drew more and more gamers to Sony and Microsoft platforms. Iwata was cautious about both sectors. In 2011, the new 3DS console featuring an offbeat stereoscopic 3D display, had a difficult launch period, with too little software and a swift price cut, so Iwata took personal responsibility. He cut his own salary by 50%, apologised to fans and investors, and gave every early purchaser of the system 10 Nintendo games for free. Last year, after disappointing financials, he again took a 50% cut in salary.

In 2013, following the sluggish performance of the Wii U, Iwata was pressed by investors to cut Nintendo’s staff to save money. “If we reduce the number of employees for better short-term financial results, employee morale will decrease,” Iwata replied. “I sincerely doubt employees who fear that they may be laid off will be able to develop software titles that could impress people around the world.” Nintendo cut no staff.

Most recently, Iwata finally ditched his instinctive mistrust of the smartphone games industry. His concerns had been about separating Nintendo software and hardware. But through a business relationship with sector specialist DeNA, he saw a way of capitalising on the boom in phone and tablet gaming, while still protecting Nintendo’s IP and values. There will be no conversions of current Nintendo console games on to smartphones, everything will be built especially for these platforms.

And in an industry where company CEOs often become pantomime villains to a demanding fanbase, Iwata was almost alone as a universally respected and liked executive. The gaming community has an insatiable appetite for in-jokes and memes – any figure of prominence becomes known best for one or two things. It says everything about Iwata that the most frequent joke is to add “[Iwata laughs]” to forum comments – a reference to his online series, Iwata Asks, where the president very frequently finds things amusing.

Iwata was a man inclined to take the road less travelled – whether that was in his innovative game code, or in revolutionising the console industry. While he was determined to bolster the Wii and DS machines with hardcore fan favourites like Super Metroid and Zelda, he never shied away from Nintendo’s child friendly reputation, believing that entertaining families was not only sensible business but a worthwhile end in itself. “Video games are meant to be just one thing,” he said. “Fun! Fun for everyone.”

He cemented this belief while talking at the 2011 game developer conference. After reflecting on his early days of games programming he said that observing the sales of Miyamoto’s games had convinced him of one thing: “engineering is not quite as important as imagination.”

Goodbye Satoru Iwata, you were right about that, and you were right about so much more.