![]() ![]() ![]() In 2011, poor sales led Nintendo to its first operating loss ever. That shouldn’t be too hard, because we operate interactively, rather than within the restraints of passive storytelling.” “The challenge for our industry is to also find ways that improve the experience by means other than what is seen. “Like Hollywood, which in the past has focused too heavily on special effects, we need to find other ways to improve,” Iwata wrote. He wrote that the industry should worry less about graphical enhancements and high-tech wizardry and instead look for ways to enhance “the emotional ways people interact with our games.” In an opinion piece Iwata wrote for The Times in 2006, he argued that the game industry was becoming too closed-off to new consumers. Games such as “Wii Sports,” which lets people play virtual tennis with the wave of an arm, captivated the public. Rather than focusing on technological achievements or becoming an all-in-one home media center, the Wii broadened the audience by enabling just about anyone to easily pick up and play a game. The system, as well as Iwata’s corporate mandate, was drastically different from those of Nintendo’s competitors in the home video game console business. The Wii was instrumental in ushering in the modern era of casual gaming, as it was heavily based on motion controls and family-centric entertainment. The GameCube failed to outsell Sony’s PlayStation 2 and Microsoft’s Xbox, compelling Nintendo to rethink its direction. Shortly before Iwata became Nintendo president in 2002, the company launched what became one of its bigger flops: the GameCube console, a successor to the Nintendo 64. He left in 2000 to become head of corporate planning at Nintendo. When HAL Laboratories verged toward bankruptcy in 1992, Iwata was made the company’s president, and he helped restore it to fiscal soundness. After his graduation in 1982, he worked full-time on game development for HAL and did contract work for Nintendo. While studying computer science at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, he took a part-time job as a programmer at HAL Laboratories, focusing on development of games such as the Kirby series. He became interested in video game programming as a teenager, fashioning simple games on his calculator. ![]()
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