At the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco in March of 2005, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata gave a keynote entitled “The Heart of a Gamer.” Upon being introduced and reaching the podium, he produced a prop: his business card. “On my business card, I am a corporate president,” Iwata said. “In my mind, I am a game developer. But in my heart, I am a gamer.”
Given the venue and the audience, Iwata’s opening was perfectly programmed to draw pronounced applause. To the game makers seated before him, Iwata was one of them. He had begun playing games with Pong and building them in 1980 at HAL Laboratory, which became a close collaborator of Nintendo. In the ’90s, Iwata worked on entries in famous franchises such as Kirby, Earthbound, Super Smash Bros., and Pokémon, all while climbing the corporate ladder. After rising to the top at HAL, he was hired by Nintendo, where he was promoted to president in 2002 and CEO in 2013 before his death from cancer in 2015.
Rising into C-suites didn’t stop Iwata from mashing C buttons. “Iwata had a reputation as a programming genius, with a talent for solving extremely difficult technical problems,” writes Keza MacDonald in her new book, Super Nintendo: The Game-Changing Company That Unlocked the Power of Play. In addition to spending time in the coding trenches as the head of HAL, “he kept on involving himself in the nuts and bolts of game development even when he was president of Nintendo,” and “his enthusiasm for game development kept him connected to the people who worked for him.” Iwata, MacDonald sums up, “brought the heart and soul of a talented game programmer and an avid player to the business of running a corporation, and Nintendo’s fans loved him for it.”
Nintendo’s fans don’t feel as strongly about the company’s current president, Shuntaro Furukawa. Although two Nintendo developers gave a talk about the making of Donkey Kong Bananza at this week’s GDC (which was rebranded the GDC Festival of Gaming), Furukawa played no part in the conference. Neither did Sony Interactive Entertainment president and CEO Hideaki Nishino, who’s responsible for PlayStation, or Asha Sharma, newly hired head of Xbox and CEO of Microsoft Gaming (even though there was an Xbox keynote). Those bigwigs wouldn’t have fit in as well as Iwata did. What’s in their minds and hearts is no different from what’s on their business cards. They’re emblematic of the new breed of console kings and queens: Not only are they not necessarily big gamers, but they’re also not prominent, public-facing figures. They conduct the console business behind the scenes.
This isn’t inherently detrimental or beneficial, but it’s definitely different. One needn’t have made games, or even necessarily played them that much, to be capable of selling them. But in contrast to past franchise frontpeople, today’s gaming decision-makers aren’t trying to do so by selling themselves. They still represent brands, but they’ve barely built brands themselves.
Iwata’s programming skills, wisdom, and warmhearted, inquisitive charisma made him something of a singular, sainted figure in the industry. But he wasn’t the only head of a major console company to have gotten his hands dirty as a developer. When Iwata took the stage at GCD, the chairman and CEO of rival Sony Computer Entertainment was Ken Kutaragi, whose interest in games dated back to the Nintendo Entertainment System. Kutaragi designed the sound chip for the Super NES, and after a failed partnership with Nintendo spurred Sony to develop its own console, he became the primary designer of the original PlayStation, as well as of its first two console successors. Kutaragi didn’t just oversee PlayStation; he was widely known as the father of the PlayStation. At GDC in 2013, he won a lifetime achievement Game Developers Choice Award, cementing his status as a developmental luminary.
Most top gaming execs haven’t been as experienced or accomplished as Iwata or Kutaragi when it comes to crafting software or hardware personally. But many others have had backgrounds in developing or producing games, such as former presidents of SIE Worldwide Studios Phil Harrison and Shuhei Yoshida and former president of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business Don Mattrick. And even those who couldn’t create still tended to play—in some cases, pretty prolifically.
Historically, console company leaders have tended to talk up their lifelong attachment to gaming, whether out of sincere enthusiasm or as a means of seeming more relatable, authentic, and trustworthy (or both). Few, if any, have pulled this off as convincingly as Sharma’s predecessor as CEO of Microsoft Gaming, Phil Spencer, who announced his retirement last month. Spencer joined Microsoft as an intern in 1988, when he was already a committed gamer. (Sample anecdote: “In his early days at Microsoft he was into Ultima Online, one of the first hugely popular multiplayer online fantasy games, which he was sometimes known to play at the office, said a former employee.”) He joined the Xbox team when the original system launched in 2001, took over in 2014, and received two subsequent promotions, ascending to CEO in 2022.
Spencer publicized his Xbox gamer tag, allowing fans to track his playing habits, document serendipitous online encounters, and brag about nuking his camp in Fallout 76. His in-game exploits were legendary, in light of the non-gaming demands of his job: Spencer 100-percented Vampire Survivors in 2023 (amid a massive acquisition), and the year-end stats he perennially published showed that (for instance) as of December 12, 2023, he had sunk 917 total hours into 82 games that year, which put him in the top 5 percent of players. Fellow Xbox players were always impressed, as were awards shows: Spencer, too, won a lifetime achievement award (at the D.I.C.E. Awards) and delivered keynotes.
If Iwata was one of them (the people who made games) and also one of us (the people who played them), Spencer was emphatically the latter, with a healthy respect for the former. He was not only a boss but also a video game guy—as in, a wife guy, but with games. “When I'm playing, it’s my escape, my fun, almost 50 years of playing video games and I still love them,” he tweeted in December 2023, in response to someone’s praise for his passion. “If ‘work hard, play hard’ was an image,” chimed in the official Xbox account. The perception that Spencer would put players first—heck, he was one!—served to soften his image and, perhaps, overshadow his missteps. “What I hope isn’t lost in today’s news about Xbox is Phil Spencer’s incredible career in gaming,” Geoff Keighley tweeted after Xbox’s leadership shake-up last month. “Phil is a passionate competitor and a big gamer. You may not have always agreed with the calls, but this industry is better thanks to his involvement.” Whatever fans thought of the CEO’s decisions, at least he wasn’t some faceless suit who had parachuted into the industry with an MBA; Spencer understood.
By virtue of his longevity and upper-percentile playtimes, Spencer was also a household name (in gaming households). So were some of the other famed former faces of gaming brands. Iwata was a walking meme, from his apologetic “please understand,” to his trademark hand gesture in Nintendo Direct presentations, to that time he dramatically beheld bananas. Kutaragi made a cameo in a comedic mini-documentary about how he designed the PlayStation. His successor, Kaz Hirai, went viral repeatedly, most memorably when he tried to pump up a crowd about Ridge Racer. These men were game makers, messengers, and mascots, sometimes all in one.
In late 2003, Nintendo hired Reggie Fils-Aimé as its executive VP of sales and marketing. He made an almost immediate impression at E3 in 2004, when he announced, “My name is Reggie, I’m about kickin’ ass, I’m about takin’ names, and we’re about makin’ games.” At a stagnant time for Nintendo, he became a cult hero, the “Regginator” who was leading a “Reggielution.” In two years, he was president of Nintendo of America, a post he held until retiring (with some fanfare) in 2019.
Fils-Aimé was combative and bombastic, unafraid to trash-talk Sony and Microsoft. He was funny, making a meme of himself when he stood on a Wii Balance Board in 2007 and told Shigeru Miyamoto, “My body is ready.” He wasn’t a video game industry lifer: He arrived at Nintendo via several other companies, including Procter & Gamble, Pizza Hut, Guinness, and VH1. But, in keeping with tradition, he frequently professed his love of gaming and early adoption of home consoles. Although he didn’t follow a Spencer-esque internal trajectory from intern to president, he explained that he “grew up learning the industry as a consumer” and implied that in a way, Nintendo had always been his destiny: “While I was working as a business executive during the day, I would be playing a variety of different games in the evening.” He was a fine speaker and performer, and part of the performance—even if it was genuine—was meeting gamers where they played. “I play all of the Nintendo games,” he once declared, before conceding, “I suck at Smash.”
Reggie was replaced by Doug Bowser, who had a video game name but next to no public profile. Bowser was a businessman, not a spokesman. Furukawa is much the same. He passes the “Did he play games?” test, crediting Mario Kart for his decision to apply to Nintendo: “Nintendo hands over Switch to 46-year-old president who grew up playing the Famicom,” reads a 2018 Japan Times headline about his promotion to president. But he comes from the accounting and corporate planning departments, and he’s largely content to let the company’s developers—and its games—speak for themselves. Nishino, who was appointed PlayStation president and CEO last year, is even more anonymous. The press release paragraph about his quarter century at Sony is soporific. He doesn’t have a Wikipedia page.
The president of Xbox under Spencer, Sarah Bond, appeared positioned to succeed him until she was seemingly ousted in favor of Sharma when Spencer retired. (Xbox Game Studios boss Matt Booty stayed on as Xbox chief content officer.) Unlike Spencer, Bond wasn’t weaned in the games industry; she did have an MBA, and she’d come to Xbox via McKinsey and T-Mobile. But she was no less eager to establish her gaming bona fides. A USA Today profile published earlier this month leads with Bond’s memories of playing King’s Quest II with her dad at age 6. “I was completely a gamer growing up,” she says in the first quote in the story, which is accompanied by multiple pictures of Bond gleefully gaming. King’s Quest II also appears in a Bond feature from a year earlier, along with Sonic the Hedgehog, GoldenEye 007, and a game she now plays with her kids, Minecraft Dungeons. Bond name-checks the same games in a recent LinkedIn post, musing, “As I look back, some of my favorite memories throughout the years are from playing video games.”
I’m not suggesting that any high-profile industry execs have exaggerated their gaming credentials; there’s probably no stolen gaming valor lurking in these obligatory recollections of childhood controller time. But there’s always been pressure on console leaders to performatively prove that they belong—particularly if they’re women (which, until recently, they typically haven’t been). Just as a female baseball lover might be challenged to “name the NL East teams in the next 10 seconds” or be branded a fake fan, a female gaming president or CEO might find herself the subject of a Reddit post that questions her résumé and asks, “Does Sarah Bond (president of Xbox) even play games?! Was she an avid gamer any-time at all in her life?!”
So there’s something brave about Sharma’s unwillingness to engage in the game of pandering to gamers—and her realization that she can’t plausibly pass as one. Before her recent job change, Sharma was the president of Microsoft’s CoreAI division; before that, she worked at Instacart and Facebook. As gaming goes, Sharma is, by her own admission, a noob. Soon after her hiring, she disclosed her own gamer tag, which she said she created recently “to learn and understand this world.” Its first achievement dates from January, making its record quite a contrast to Spencer’s fabled 120,000-plus Gamerscore. (Although even Spencer’s account has drawn doubts and suspicion.)
When IGN’s Ryan McCaffrey speculated on Twitter that “an experienced gamer on the Xbox team may be helping her sound more like a ‘real gamer’ with her social replies” and asserted, “It's a bad idea for her to try and fake this,” Sharma directly replied: “I agree. Faking would be a terrible idea and wouldn’t work. … But I get where this is coming from. I don’t pretend to be the best gamer and even though I’m playing, that’s still not my goal. My focus is to make Xbox the best place to play, return to our roots, ship great things, and become stronger for the future.” In statements and interviews, she has hammered the humility in sentiments such as “My first job is simple: understand what makes this work and protect it,” “Right now, I need to learn, candidly,” and “[I have] a lot to learn.”
Seamus Blackley, who cocreated and designed the original Xbox, told GamesBeat last month that those comments made him incredulous. “I think younger me would be screaming about this and saying, ‘What the hell? Why would you put somebody in charge of a record label who didn’t like records?’ Looking at it now from my perspective, I probably still feel that way. … But at the same time, I understand exactly why it is.”
To Blackley, Sharma’s AI experience and lack of familiarity with gaming, compared with the cast-off Bond (“super cool, actual gamer”), reflect Microsoft’s belief “that AI will subsume games like it will subsume everything.” Considering the company’s priorities, he said, “It would have been shocking if they had somebody in there in a meaningful role who was passionate about games, passionate about the creator-driven business of games, because it would be in direct conflict with everything else Microsoft is doing.” Thus, Sharma’s job, he opined, “is going to be as a palliative care doctor who slides Xbox gently into the night.”
If Sharma is serious about sustaining and strengthening Xbox, Blackley cautioned, she shouldn’t be overconfident. “There’s something about games—when you play them, they seem so effortless,” Blackley said. “There’s an assumption that anyone can do it. This can also get you in a lot of trouble.” Sarcastically, he continued, “Gamers are very tolerant of being told what games are by people who are not gamers.”
It’s not as if Spencer, the gamer’s gamer, left the Xbox brand in great shape. (Granted, his marching orders from Microsoft may not have helped.) But can someone who didn’t grow up with games or serve an extended apprenticeship ever learn the ropes? “People have succeeded at that before,” Blackley said. “Maybe [Sharma] will.”
Tom Kalinske, who jumped from Mattel and Matchbox to Sega in the ’90s and dethroned a dominant Nintendo, was one such person. So was Peter Moore, who later left Reebok to join Sega (where he helped launch the Dreamcast) and, subsequently, Microsoft, to boost the Xbox and Xbox 360. The only thing Moore knew about gaming before he was headhunted by Sega is that the Sega Saturn he’d bought his son had been a bust. But eventually, he got up to speed. “If you could sell sneakers, you could sell video games,” he told The Game Business last year.
After Moore’s stint at Sega, Microsoft hired him to take the fight to Sony. He thrived throwing punches. “Maybe it’s all my fault, developing the console wars and getting in each other’s faces,” he said. “Gamers loved it. These are the lessons I learned from the sneaker wars of Reebok vs. Nike vs. Adidas vs. Puma. You create this sense of competition, and the consumer loves it because they think they’re soldiers in a battle. I’m a PlayStation guy, I’m an Xbox guy, I’m a Sega guy or girl.”
Moore, like Fils-Aimé, had a knack for theatrics: He announced Grand Theft Auto IV and the release date for Halo 2 by rolling up his sleeves to reveal tattoos on his arms. It’s hard to imagine a Microsoft exec pulling that sort of stunt today.
Even if physical (X)boxes aren’t a passé way to play, and PCs aren’t destined to dominate, console gaming may have moved past the need for presidents and CEOs who are scrappers and showmen. The console wars are over, right? (Right?) In a world with less exclusivity, there are fewer rabid fans of one brand who long to line up behind a hype person. Plus, the medium has matured. Kutaragi created the PlayStation from scratch, which may have put him in the best position to nurture its growth. Iwata was the first Nintendo president from outside the company’s founding family and the first to take control after Nintendo’s transformation into a video game maker. His predecessor, Hiroshi Yamauchi, had run the company for more than half a century, since 1949.
Gaming technology was still somewhat rudimentary when Kutaragi, Iwata, and Spencer started, and the business wasn’t as big. Both have evolved, and although it doesn’t always seem like it, so has the audience. Gamers are a culture, not a subculture. They’re not as stigmatized by normies because they’ve become normies. Maybe they don’t need to rally around a leader who assures them that they know the same secret handshake and subscribe to the same tribe.
At the end of the press conference in which he announced his abdication as Nintendo’s president, Yamauchi left Iwata with one request: “That Nintendo give birth to wholly new ideas and create hardware which reflects that ideal. And make software that adheres to that same standard.” Iwata died more than a decade ago, and many Nintendo fans couldn’t name either of the presidents who’ve served since. But the company’s software is as innovative as ever. Hardware-wise, though? Iwata more than fulfilled Yamauchi’s request with the DS, the Wii, and the Switch. But as pleased as Yamauchi would probably be with the Switch 2’s sales, “wholly new” it’s not.
With Iwata long absent and his contemporaries embracing retirement—even Valve’s Gabe Newell, on the eve of the Steam Machine’s second coming, spends many of his days scuba diving from increasingly luxurious yachts—gaming’s competent corporate soldiers are ascendant. Maybe Yamauchi foresaw the downside of such unexciting, stable stewardship, in which art is evaluated via shareholder value: that gaming hardware would be iterative and risk-averse, rather than revolutionary. After all, revolutions require revolutionaries.
