He Stayed a Player Until the End

He Stayed a Player Until the End

Three weeks before he died, in June 2015, Satoru Iwata appeared at Nintendo's E3 event. He was the president of the company. He was also gravely ill. He did not walk on stage in a suit. He appeared as a puppet — built by the Jim Henson company, the people behind the Muppets — trading jokes with two other puppets, Reggie and Shigeru Miyamoto. A dying man chose to meet the world as a cartoon of himself.

Ten years earlier, he had opened a speech with a line people still repeat: on his business card he was a president, in his mind a developer, but in his heart a gamer. He ran a company the way you stay inside a game — facing the players, not standing above them. His broadcasts spoke to faces in front of a camera, never down from a boardroom.

I think about this at my desk. A used console arrives, yellowed, a little tired. I cannot make it new again; it has already lived in someone's hands. But I can clean it slowly, check what is worn, and pack it so that the moment it reaches the next person comes close to the feeling of a new machine arriving for the first time. For most of my customers, a retro game is a reward they give themselves after a long stretch of work.

I will never run anything the size of Nintendo. But Iwata showed me something simpler than scale: that the point was never to sit above the people you serve. It was to stay on their side, facing them, until the end. That is the only kind of shop I want to keep — one that is quietly on the side of whoever opens the box.