Satoru Iwata speelde een grote rol bij het groot maken van Nintendo. Ondanks zijn overlijden op 11 juli 2015 is zijn invloed op het Japanse concern nog altijd voelbaar. Shigeru Miyamoto sprak in een interview over de rol die de president van Nintendo had bij de ontwikkeling van de Switch.
Voor sommige misschien verrassend dat Miyamoto benadrukt hoe groot de rol van Iwata was bij het ontwikkelen van Nintendo’s komende console. Volgens Shigeru is het kernconcept van de Switch volledig toe te schrijven op de naam van wijlen Satoru. De volledige reactie (in het engels) kun je hieronder lezen.
Is there anything in particular about Switch that reflects Satoru Iwata’s involvement?
I mentioned that Mr. Iwata, Mr. Takeda and myself provided feedback and made decisions, but ultimately Mr. Iwata was the head of development, so he put a lot of thought and time into Switch. I think that the idea of Nintendo Switch being a device you can take out and anywhere, and the idea of it being a system that really allows networking and communicating with people, I think that’s something Mr. Iwata put a lot of emphasis on.
Because Mr. Iwata was tech-savvy, a lot of our discussion involved trying to figure out how to make the technical things like network capabilities or servers or whatever fun. For example, think about when we added the ability to use a browser on the DS [Nintendo’s two-screen gaming handheld—the browser was added to North American systems in 2007]. As time goes on, all of these services become more and more advanced, and so we need to think about “How do we incorporate mobile devices or new browser features that come up?” That’s something Mr. Iwata and I discussed a lot, really trying to decide what to do and what not to do in our hardware.
Het volledige interview kun je hier terug vinden.
Was een goede man, jammer dat hij overleden is.