Ask Iwata

Why it’s on the list: A short collection of Satoru Iwata in his own words, assembled after his death in 2015 — the programmer who became Nintendo’s fourth president, on hiring, on why he kept writing code, and on making games fun for people who did not already play games.

Where I heard about it

• a16z’s infrastructure team — one of the two non-fiction entries on the a16z Infra Reading List. Their note credits Iwata 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.

About this edition

Drawn from the Iwata Asks interview series and his conversations with Hobonichi, which published the Japanese original in 2019; the English translation is the 2021 VIZ Media edition.

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.