Nintendo President Iwata Keen To Avoid Arrogance

Speaking in a new interview with Newsweek’s N'Gai Croal, originally conducted during the E3 2007 event in July, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has spoken of his desire to avoid accusations of arrogance at the company following its current run of success. Asked how he felt now that the perception of Nintendo within the industry had changed, from an assumption of failure to one of success, Iwata commented: “Being part of the entertainment industry, part of our job is to surprise our audiences … If you're introducing these new things and everyone's saying, ‘Oh yeah, this is great,’ ‘We'll take that,’ ‘That's a great idea,’ it's very difficult to maintain within the company the energy it takes to be always looking forward.” “That's probably Nintendo's next obstacle is to not lose its internal energy and internal momentum. I believe my most important role right now is to prevent Nintendo from being in a company where people say, ‘Oh, Nintendo is arrogant,’ ‘Nintendo has let its guard down,’ or ‘Nintendo has lost its challenging spirit.’ We want to avoid all of the pitfalls that can come from losing one's momentum.” In a wide ranging interview, Iwata also commented on fears expressed by some that Nintendo was abandoning its old hardcore audience with its push into the casual games market. “We have no intention of abandoning our core players and the people who have been Nintendo fans over the course of our history,” he said. “We really want to do a lot of unique things. So in the course of doing things that are unique, we're obviously going to, by the definition of the term, not produce some of the things people are expecting.” “Looking at the titles Mario Galaxy, Smash Bros. and whatnot - those are hitting the latter phase of production right now. So we've already started moving manpower into new products, new titles, new themes. Still, we really believe that part of our mission is to make traditional games for our traditional audience,” he added. Iwata commented multiple times that Nintendo was working on new games and intellectual properties not shown at E3, but implied it was now company policy not to reveal new titles as early as the firm had in the past.