What Nintendo’s late president Satoru Iwata told me, a long time ago
www.gamefile.news
Words and some audio from an old interview tape

"The tape is crackly, and the live translation is not the best. Mr. Iwata, then two years into his tenure as Nintendo’s president, listens to my questions in English, answers in Japanese and then waits as his comments are translated for me.

The topic is the Nintendo DS, a then-upcoming Nintendo handheld that proved one of gaming’s biggest successes but at the time seemed like a potentially disastrous idea. Could it even be the end of Nintendo?"

  • @KlystronEnglish
    8•6 months ago

    I remember my dad telling me about an article he read about the new Nintendo device that was going to have TWO screens. My 8 year old brain could not even fathom what that would be like… I do remember playing my gba sp and at one point closing the screen and then upon opening it up again later that it had died. I remember wishing that if there was only a way to turn the screen off when it was closed so you could save battery life… Imagine my surprise when I found out about sleep mode on the DS!

    Now that I’m grown up and understand the anti consumer practices that Nintendo implements on its products enrages me, but fuck man, growing up I could not get enough of my Gameboy color, advance, sp, DS, Wii, 3ds… It’s so hard to hate them.

    • @mindbleachEnglish
      1•6 months ago

      Someone at school told me about it and I had to explain, I wasn’t doubting them, I was doubting their source. The rumor seemed completely made-up. There was no reason for a gaming company to do that.

      But Nintendo is a toy company. They saw the PSP coming, figured they couldn’t compete on quality, and did some weird bullshit that would only ever be possible on their hardware.

      Their R&D staff are top-notch. Their legal department can eat a dick.