Satoru Iwata talks missed Wii U features, shares game-dev tales in new interview

Nintendo’s president Satoru Iwata hasn’t always been the boss-man at Nintendo, once upon a time he was a programmer at the company.

In a new interview with Japanese media site 4gamer the now Nintendo president has sat down for a huge chat about his own game development work, his work now as Nintendo’s boss and how he once wanted to be the next Miyamoto.

Before becoming president Satoru Iwata worked at HAL and at the time he believed his might even be  the best developer in the industry at writing NES code. Even better than Nintendo’s EAD team themselves.

[quote]There was definitely a period of time after I began working at HAL when I sort of fancied myself to be the most proficient software engineer in the video games industry. Because I believed things like that I could write better NES code than even Nintendo’s (EAD) engineers or that I could write the fastest, most compact code.[/quote]

The NES was a really long time ago, but Satoru Iwata was still working on games as in the late 90s, one such game was Super Smash Bros and he possible saved it from being delayed

[quote]Aaah, 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 (Wry Laugh).

At the time, I went to HAL Labs in Yamanashi and was the acting head of debugging. So, I did the code review, fixed some bugs, read the code and fixed more bugs, read the long bug report from Nintendo, figured out where the problem was and got people to fix those…all in all I spent about three weeks like that. And, because of that, the game made it out on time.

And that was the last time that I worked as an engineer ‘in the field’. I was right there, sitting by programmers, in the trenches, reading code together, finding the bugs, and fixing them together.[/quote]

So is Iwata still tinkering away in code these days? Sort of;

[quote]Even if I understand the principles, I just can’t take the time to fully update my skills. So, with time, I’ve found myself having to ask what certain things are.[/quote]

So what about this rivalry with Miyamoto then? Iwata admits that in his early days that he wanted to ‘give him [Miyamoto] hell”. He won’t say how much, but Iwata does admit he did eventually end up giving him just a little bit of hell.

[quote] Would you believe that for a long time I’d just decided within myself, completely arbitrarily and not at all reciprocated, that he was my rival and I wanted to do something to just give him hell.[/quote]

While Satoru Iwata might be a game programmer god there are still things he regrets and is frustrated with – especially with hardware. Iwata tells of his frustration with the GameBoy Advance SP not having a proper sleep feature, when you close the lid of that console the screen remains on and the console still working at 100%.

[quote]The GBA SP was also a clam-shell 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. [/quote]

The next console however, the Nintendo DS as it would be known as did have this feature, Iwata eventually got his way.

[quote]I was really upset by that at the time. But that feeling of ‘We must do it next time!’ connected directly to implementing that feature into the DS.

[/quote]

Iwata also admits that they had similar frustrations with the Wii U, things that would have to wait for ‘next time’. However he never goes into what exactly. Nintendo is always going to be working on the ‘next time’ this is no surprise but its interesting to see Nintendo become more loose with talking about what may be next.

Just don’t get any ideas, 2015 is going to be a great year for the Wii U – Nintendo’s not going to announce anything new and spoil it all.

You can read the full interview and the rest of the translations on NeoGAF here.
Original interview, pictures: 4gamer (Japanese)