page_title: Satoru Iwata
section_title: Revitalization of the company (2003–09)
hierarchical_section_title: Satoru Iwata / Nintendo / Revitalization of the company (2003–09)
caption_attribution_description: English: The Wii console by Nintendo. Featured with the Wiimote.
context_page_description: Satoru Iwata was a Japanese businessman, video game programmer, video game designer and producer. He was the fourth president and chief executive officer of Nintendo. He was a major contributor in broadening the appeal of video games by focusing on novel and entertaining games rather than top-of-the-line hardware.
  Born in Sapporo, Japan, Iwata expressed interest in video games from an early age and created his first simple game while in high school. He majored in computer science at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. In 1980, he joined the game developer HAL Laboratory while attending the university. At HAL, he worked as a programmer and closely collaborated with Nintendo, producing his first commercial game in 1983. Games to which he contributed include EarthBound and the Kirby series. Following a downturn and near-bankruptcy, Iwata became the president of HAL in 1993 at the insistence of Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi and brought financial stability. In the following years, he worked in the development of the Pokémon and Super Smash Bros. series. Iwata joined Nintendo as the head of its corporate planning division in 2000.
context_section_description: Following up on his 2002 interview, Iwata highlighted an urgency in the gaming market in his keynote speech at the 2003 Tokyo Game Show. During this speech, he reflected on the history of the industry and concluded with the declining interest in video games. A slump in sales in the Japanese market had begun at the end of the 1990s and continued into the early 2000s. Competition between Nintendo and Sony resulted in increasingly hardware-heavy consoles; however, the Nintendo 64 proved to be too cumbersome for developers and software suffered severely. After a year-long analysis conducted at Iwata's behest, Nintendo concluded that pushing hardware was not the most effective way to promote video games and decided to focus on software. A major internal reorganization of Nintendo took place in 2004, with Iwata consolidating various departments established under Yamauchi. He sought to promote collaborative work throughout the company. He later established a "User Expansion Project" in 2005 whereby employees normally not associated with game development would submit ideas for new games.
  In a March 2004 interview, Iwata stated: "Games have come to a dead end." He stressed that developers wasted far too much time focusing on core gamers and would be unable to turn a profit if they did not tend to the average game player. Furthermore, he wished to prove that Nintendo, considered a "conservative" company at the time, would become a forefront innovator of entertainment. Iwata articulated a "blue ocean" strategy to help Nintendo successfully compete against the other console manufacturers. Instead of competing on technical specifications, Iwata drew on his previous experience as a game developer to produce novel and entertaining hardware and games.
caption: Iwata directed Nintendo to produce the Nintendo DS (left) and Wii (right) units, which proved financially successful for the company
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