Miyamoto Talks About Satoru Iwata's Involvement In Creating Nintendo Switch

In a new interview with Time, Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto talked about the late president Satoru Iwata's involvement in the creation and development of the Nintendo Switch.

Asked if there is anything specifically that reflects Iwata's involvement in the system, Miyamoto said of course Iwata was heavily involved in major decisions.

"Mr. Iwata was the head of development, so he put a lot of thought and time into Switch," he said. "I think that the idea of Nintendo Switch being a device you can take out and anywhere, and the idea of it being a system that really allows networking and communicating with people, I think that's something Mr. Iwata put a lot of emphasis on."

Miyamoto added: "Because Mr. Iwata was tech-savvy, a lot of our discussion involved trying to figure out how to make the technical things like network capabilities or servers or whatever fun. For example, think about when we added the ability to use a browser on the DS. As time goes on, all of these services become more and more advanced, and so we need to think about, 'How do we incorporate mobile devices or new browser features that come up?' That's something Mr. Iwata and I discussed a lot, really trying to decide what to do and what not to do in our hardware."

Iwata died in July 2015; he was replaced by Tatsumi Kimishima.

Also in the interview, Miyamoto recalled some of the meetings he attended for the Switch.

"A lot of the younger staff would give us presentations, and we would give them feedback and make decisions if necessary," he said. "The feedback that we did provide I think was put to good use, and I don't think there were any times where we had major clashes of ideas. If anything, we had to think about how to make Switch unique, and there's a certain cost associated with that. So it was like, 'Oh my God, it's going to be a lot more expensive. How are we going to deal with this?' We struggled with that together as a team."

You can read the full Time interview here.

The Switch launches on March 3, priced at $300. For lots more on the console, check out all of GameSpot's previous coverage here.