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.
