When I think about the kind of engineer and leader I aspire to be, my mind always drifts to Satoru Iwata.
Iwata-san was a CEO unlike any other. He started as a programmer at HAL Laboratory, where he became known for being fiendishly clever. The stories are legendary: debugging Earthbound when the project was on the brink of collapse, compressing Pokemon Gold and Silver’s data so efficiently that they could fit an entire second region into the game. When there was a crisis, Iwata didn’t delegate from a distance, he rolled up his sleeves and wrote code alongside his team.
Happiness as a guiding principle
What strikes me most about Iwata-san is that he genuinely believed in happiness as a metric for success. Not just for players, but for the people building the games. He understood that happy engineers make better products. This wasn’t naive optimism, it was a philosophy backed by action. When Nintendo faced financial difficulties, he cut his own salary in half rather than lay off employees.
His famous quote captures this perfectly: “On my business card, I am a corporate president. In my mind, I am a game developer. But in my heart, I am a gamer.”
Fierce despite the shyness
There’s something deeply admirable about how Iwata-san handled public presence. By his own admission, he was a shy person. Yet he became the face of Nintendo Direct, appearing in countless videos with that warm, slightly awkward charm. He hosted “Iwata Asks”, the long-form interviews where he genuinely engaged with developers about their craft.
He didn’t hide behind PR teams or carefully scripted corporate speak. He showed up, answered questions honestly, and let his passion for games shine through. That takes a quiet kind of courage.
What I take from this
Iwata-san showed me that technical excellence and genuine kindness aren’t at odds with each other. That you can be a leader who still gets their hands dirty with the work. That caring about your team’s wellbeing isn’t soft, it’s strategic. And that showing up authentically, even when it feels uncomfortable, builds something no amount of corporate polish ever could.
I keep a copy of Ask Iwata close to where I work. It’s a collection of his words and wisdom, compiled from interviews and his writings. Whenever I need a reminder of the kind of engineer and leader I want to be, it’s right there within arm’s reach.
One quote from him stays with me: “Above all, video games are meant to be just one thing: fun. Fun for everyone.”
That spirit of joy and craft is what I aspire to bring to my own work.