Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata recently sat down for a rare long form interview with a Japanese gaming site. Realizing that many of us are not fluent in Japanese (even in spite of the classes I took in college) we can thank the dedicated bilingual gaming fans who have translated Iwata’s sit down. Hardcore and casual gamers alike cannot deny the massive influence Nintendo has had on our beloved world of video games, so it should come as no surprise that any interview that offers insight into the brilliant minds that changed the world grabs worldwide attention. Here are some of the highlights from the Nintendo CEO’s sit down.
On Shigeru Miyamoto and his desire to develop the “Miyamoto Methodology”:
“So, I have this strange sense of duty regarding the codifying of the “Miyamoto Methodology”, because I feel like it would be useful to the game industry if you could put it into words. I started up a project similar to ‘Iwata Asks’ for that purpose. And, of course, wanted to see it put into words so I could understand it too, because back when I was just starting out, I sort of arbitrarily decided that Miyamoto was my rival, though that’s embarrassing to admit now. Miyamoto is, as you’d expect, an amazing person and without a doubt possesses a methodology that I don’t have and I always felt it was a waste that it wasn’t verbalized.”
Iwata on the first games he coded:
“In my years as a student in high school and college, I would make games on a Hewlett-Packard HP-67 calculator… Back then, I made a Stark Trek themed game by myself. I managed to get over the calculator’s restriction of only allowing 224 steps per program by using 6 different magnetic cards. It was a masterpiece of calculator programming! The people at Hewlett Packard’s Japanese Agency were really surprised. It was a ton of data to send. By that point, I was no longer worried about the HP-67’s documentation.”
Iwata describes the last time he was coding:
“Ah, I wonder if it’s alright to admit this? Well, I guess the proverbial statute of limitations is up, so I’ll tell you, but my actual last work on programming happened when I was working as the General Manager of Corporate Planning at Nintendo. Something happened and the Gamecube version of Super Smash Brothers didn’t look like it was going to make its release date so I sort of did a code review for it.”
On how frustration with the inability to implement features on the GameBoy Advance impacted the Nintendo DS:
“…By the way, speaking of usability, the Nintendo DS was the first portable game system to have a sleep function, but that feature was the result out of the frustration of not being able to implement it with the GameBoy Advance SP. The GBA SP was also a clamshell design, so I pretty adamantly demanded of the hardware team that it went into sleep mode when it was closed. ‘This feature is absolutely essential!’ I said. However, at that time, they told me that as it would take re-working the chip so it could be turned on and off it would take a year to do it, so I had to reluctantly withdraw my request. Nevertheless, I did tell them that they had to make sure the next system they designed would be able to go into sleep mode.”
It appears that there is still large portions of Iwata’s interview that have yet to be translated, but you can head over to this NeoGAF forum post to see the rest of the interview and the newest translated portions. I’ve gotta say, anytime I read interviews with the geniuses at Nintendo, I always get the sense that they never lost their love of gaming and their drive for perfection. What do you think?