Iwata: Shigeru Miyamoto isn’t God

Satoru Iwata, President and CEO of Nintendo, has admitted that Shigeru Miyamoto “is not God.” Morever, Iwata explained that some software have “turned out to be lacking something in the end.”

“If you have included our inability to launch software in a timely fashion in the former half of this year as one of these mistakes, I have to express my disagreement to such a use of the term. Honestly speaking, whether entertainment software is good enough or not cannot be told until development nears completion. Even amongst the software created by Shigeru Miyamoto of Nintendo, some have turned out to be entertaining enough in line with the original development concept while some turned out to be lacking something in the end.

One of the reasons why Miyamoto is highly praised is because of his ability to stop, rethink about, and fix how he can convey the appeal of a software when he finds out during the latter phase of development that the software will not be good enough. This is why the games he has worked on have a high batting average to produce big hits. However, he is not God and even Miyamoto himself cannot hit the mark every time nor always predict how long it takes to complete development. I believe my management job is to set parameters of the development timeframe, and with this uncertainty in mind, to plan our product launch timings without too much time between each one, but it is not easy to get this down perfectly…”