Satoru Iwata

“One thing about the entertainment industry - it's not something that people need to survive.”

“Trust your passion. Believe in your dream.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Nintendo's mission is to try to make people happy, to try to make people smile.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I read blogs quite a bit.”

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

“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.”

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

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