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# Nintendo

2026-10-22

Gunpei Yokoi: 'Lateral Thinking With Withered Technology'—How a Factory Repairman Built the Game Boy and Beat Every High-Spec Rival

Ranked #36 in '100 Product Managers Who Changed the World': Gunpei Yokoi (OVR 89.35: Taste 93, Originality 92, Vision 90, Insight 90, Scale 87, Business 85). Hired to maintain playing-card machines at Nintendo, he was spotted building a spring-loaded toy during work hours, went on to invent the cross D-Pad and the 118.69M-selling Game Boy, and proved that cheap, mature parts reimagined for human joy will always crush bleeding-edge specs.

2026-10-21

Satoru Iwata: 'President on My Card, Coder in My Head, Gamer at Heart'—How Nintendo's Programmer-CEO Put Grandma and Grandson on the Same Console

Ranked #35 in '100 Product Managers Who Changed the World': Satoru Iwata (OVR 89.65: Insight 93, Taste 92, Vision 90, Originality 89, Scale 88, Business 86). The first non-Yamauchi president in Nintendo's 113-year history personally rewrote code to save EarthBound and Pokémon Gold/Silver, defied the polygon wars to sell 255M NDS and Wii consoles, and cut his own salary by 50% rather than lay off a single engineer.

2026-10-21

Super Mario Bros.: How a 40-Kilobyte Cartridge Taught Humanity to Play in 30 Seconds Without a Single Word of Text

Ranked #27 in '100 Products That Changed the World': Super Mario Bros. (OVR 90.00: Impact 95, Experience 95, Originality 92, Scale 87, Durability 87, Business 85). After the 1983 Atari crash left North American gaming in ruins, Shigeru Miyamoto packed eight worlds, momentum physics, and World 1-1's legendary zero-text onboarding into just 40KB of memory—rescuing an entire industry.

2026-10-17

100 Product Managers Who Changed the World · #32: Ken Kutaragi

The 'Father of the PlayStation' and former CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment. In 1988, fascinated by his daughter's Famicom, he secretly designed the legendary SPC700 audio chip for Sony's rival Nintendo; after Nintendo humiliated Sony at the 1991 Chicago CES by tearing up their CD-ROM partnership on stage, Kutaragi defied Sony's aristocratic anti-toy executives ('Do we just stand down?!'), bet everything on real-time 3D polygons and $1 CD-ROMs, and built the 500-million-unit PlayStation empire. Ranked #32 among the 100 PMs who changed the world, with an overall score of 90.30 (displayed as 90) — vision 94, originality 93, scale 90, taste 88, business 88, insight 86.

2026-08-12

The Greatest Product Managers, No. 10: Shigeru Miyamoto — He Handed Over Mario's Day-to-Day and Kept Exactly One Thing: He Plays the First 30 Minutes of Every Game Himself

At 72, Shigeru Miyamoto is Nintendo's Executive Fellow and a Representative Director, and has formally stepped back from day-to-day work on the Super Mario series, handing it to a younger generation. He kept one action: he personally plays roughly the first 30 minutes of every game, to check whether it feels like Mario. He ranks 10th on our board, OVR 95: taste 99 and originality 99 are top of the entire list, while business 88 and scale 92 are the two lowest numbers in the top ten — the exact mirror of Gates (business 99, originality 94), written yesterday. This piece is about succession: the one thing a person keeps when they let go is the judgment they believe cannot be delegated.