About a decade ago, Bobby Kotick, chief executive of the video games company Activision Blizzard, flew to Kyoto to visit Nintendo. He was shown to a room with a television on which was displayed an image of a pond with bubbles floating to the surface. Satoru Iwata, Nintendo’s president, handed him a games controller called a wand and guided his hand to cast a virtual fishing line.
As Mr Kotick drew back the wand, observed by Iwata and Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo’s chief games designer, a fish popped out of the pond. “I remember the delight on their faces as they saw me realise that this would change the face of entertainment — these two guys who had the instinct, the courage and the vision to do something radically different,” he says.
Iwata, who this week died of cancer at 55, was often regarded as the business partner to a creative genius — the Roy Disney to Mr Miyamoto’s Walt, the Domenico de Sole to Mr Miyamoto’s Tom Ford at Gucci, or the business half of Steve Jobs’s brain at Apple. That understates his role in guiding Nintendo to an extraordinary coup with the launch of the Wii console in 2006.