Do we like them?

Do we like Satoru Iwata?

Our score: 8 out of 10. No harmful words or acts turned up, and a well-reported record of protecting his staff, but the research behind this card was thin.

Satoru Iwata was born in Sapporo in 1959, studied computer science at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, and started out as a programmer at HAL Laboratory, a company tied to Nintendo. He was a working coder first and an executive second, which shaped how he ran things.

In 2002 he became Nintendo's president, the first with no blood ties to the Yamauchi family who had run the firm since 1949. Under him the company launched the DS and the Wii, two consoles that pulled in people who had never picked up a controller.

The story people keep retelling is about money. When Nintendo struggled around the Wii U's weak sales, Iwata reportedly cut his own salary by half instead of laying off employees, and other senior executives reportedly took smaller cuts. It went viral again in 2024 when the games industry was hit by waves of layoffs.

On the harm check, we came up empty. No campaigning against LGBTQ+ people, no conspiracy rabbit holes, no dodgy company. Nintendo's 2014 refusal to allow same-sex relationships in Tomodachi Life drew heavy criticism, but the reports we saw attribute that decision to the company, not to anything Iwata personally said, so we haven't counted it against him.

Nothing new on him lately. He died in 2015, and the recent coverage is anniversary and tribute pieces that look back at his ideas. Industry tributes remember him as a leader who treated staff as people, not line items.

A caveat: we couldn't open every page we wanted, so this rests on thin sourcing rather than a deep dive. What is there points one way. He is remembered as a decent boss, and not a single sour note turned up.