Nintendo's President Hopes To Avoid 'Return to Arrogance'

Today Newsweek's N'Gai Croal has up an interview originally held back at E3, speaking with current President of Nintendo Satoru Iwata. The piece is an interesting look inside one of the top minds at a company that has experienced unprecedented success in the last year. In the interview, Iwata states that one of his most important tasks right now is to avoid allowing the company to appear arrogant. Just because people now assume Nintendo will succeed, he needs to make sure that's not the company's view as well. "This time, we were very lucky and very fortunate that people were accepting and positive about the introduction of the Wii Balance Board and the Wii Zapper. Now, what we have to do, what's very important for us is to make sure that when those products are actually launched, we not only meet their expectations, but we surpass them so there's that gap--we thought it was going to be this, when actually it's here. We need to create that buzz. We need to create that word of mouth and that's our challenge."

Comments

Re:Memo to all third-party developers:

[Incoherent07]

That crap has far more production value than the crap Nintendo was trying to avoid.

Re:Memo to all third-party developers:

[steveo777]

Riiight.. I don't see how people could hold the 10NES against Nintendo. They used it (albeit mainly) to keep crapware off their systems. Yeah, they also wanted to capitalize as much as possible, but if they hadn't, do you really think Nintendo would have had the same success? There's a good chance there would have been a lot of junk that gave Nintendo a bad name and ran it into the ground.

Most the 3rd parties still made gobs of money and are still existing in one form or another. Nintendo went on to create more great systems and games (yes, even the N64... Virtual Boy? not so much).

Re:Memo to all third-party developers:

[gameboyhippo]

Yeah, if only Christian games were half as good as contemporary Christian music (P.O.D, Lifehouse, etc...)

Re:Memo to all third-party developers:

[drcagn]

Anyone who lived through the NES era will know that this is not true. The NES is second only to the PSONE in terms of the "If you build it, they will come" mentality. Suffice it to say it was all about making money. Wikipedia has a some good details you might be interested in reading. The "Nintendo Seal of Quality" didn't mean much about how good a game was (in terms of "fun"). All it meant was that Nintendo was paid their license fee.

Anyone who lived through the Atari era will know that every game on NES was gold compared to the amount of steaming shit that was put out for the 2600. Comparatively, the NES had great quality control.