economics

I’ve read plenty about Nintendo from the outside. This is the rare book from inside: Hobonichi columns and interviews, collected and translated after Iwata’s death. President on the business card, developer in his mind, gamer in his heart, and he plainly ranked those in reverse.

The bits about controllers are my favourites, because it’s the one component where hardware and software have to agree before either is finished. Iwata sets out the Nintendo loop: hardware passes a controller idea to the software teams, who build prototype games with it and report back. The games come out of that accumulation, not from fitting software to a device someone has already signed off, like at other games companies.

I was surprised how stubborn he was about the Wii’s name. “We absolutely need to call this a remote,” on the grounds that the TV remote is the one object in a house anybody will pick up unprompted, and a controller isn’t. The same instinct covers the D-pad, which in the 1980s struck most people as a peculiar thing to be handed.

As a book it’s slight. Aphorisms grouped by theme, the same instincts circling back, and by halfway you can guess the shape of an answer before it arrives. Iwata was president through a stretch when I was paying less attention to games than I had before, or have since, so I don’t carry the memories of him that other people do. I knew his name from the NES days, though, and I know how much he’s missed.