Ask Iwata

A short collection of Satoru Iwata in his own words, assembled after his death in 2015 from the Iwata Asks interview series and his conversations with Hobonichi — the programmer who became Nintendo’s fourth president, on hiring, on why he kept writing code, and on making games that were fun for people who did not already play games.

Context: the second of the two non-fiction entries on the list. a16z’s note credits him with the compression work that squeezed a second region onto the Pokémon Gold/Silver cartridge and describes his management style as debugging applied to organisations: “understand the system, find the bottleneck, optimize with elegance.” That is why a book about a game company lands on an infrastructure team’s shelf.

Connections

• a16z Infra Reading List — the list this came from; Non-fiction section, its own entry.
• Satoru Iwata — the subject, and the voice the book collects.
• Company Building — what the book is actually about, underneath the games.
• Leadership Principles — the management thinking the interviews keep returning to.
• Gaming — the industry he ran a company in.
• a16z — the firm whose infrastructure team curates the list.