Watch Nintendo’s Satoru Iwata predict the future of consoles 20 years ago

Beloved former President of Nintendo Satoru Iwata said many profound and memorable things throughout his career, but thanks to a reuploaded and remastered Kikizo interview from E3 2004, we have even more.

The video, which was uploaded by Kiziko founder Adam Doree over the weekend, is now watchable in 1440p at 60 frames per second. According to the Kikizo archives, the original video was posted in an astounding 320-by-240 resolution, so the quality upgrades alone make it worth watching.

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While his remarks on the state of the video game industry at the time aren’t new, they feel almost prophetic in 2024, where most of his predictions about the console market have come true. For example, when talking about the then upcoming Nintendo DS and the Wii (which was called the Revolution at the time), he said that Nintendo’s strengths are about innovation. This, he added, would separate Nintendo consoles from competitors like PlayStation and Xbox.

“I don’t think the next-generation consoles that Sony and Microsoft are considering have a future. If I thought so, we would be doing the same thing, right?” Iwata says, according to subtitles on the video. “Even if I had a machine with 10 times the processing power and 20 times the graphics, the work would be harder, and I don’t think it’s that easy to make customers clearly recognize the difference.”

“When other companies release products that are improvements on existing ones, the question is whether Nintendo can release something that can be called revolutionary. In this way, our goal is for our challenge to bear fruit, and I believe that is what we should be doing,” he continues.

He didn’t have much to say about the Wii, which was still in development and wouldn’t be revealed until the following year, but