Where Do Iwata Asks Topics Come From?

Nintendo president, Satoru Iwata, often likes to conduct interviews with various Nintendo developers, as well as third-party developers, regarding the development process of the games they’re working on. These interviews, titled “Iwata Asks,” can often be very enlightening and give a fair bit of insight into the development of various games.

So, just how does Iwata come up with topics to discuss at each interview? The answer is “Monday lunches”. About once a week — usually on Mondays — Iwata joins Nintendo’s other upper management staff, including Mario veterans Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka, to listen in on their lunchtime conversations.

The reason he specifically chooses Mondays to carry out this practise is because he finds that the staff spend weekends mulling various ideas over in their heads, and then bring them up on Mondays, which makes the Monday conversations the most interesting to listen to.

Sometimes, Iwata chooses to attend lunches on Tuesdays and Wednesdays as well. Those are the days where the conversation typically steers toward problems surfacing during the development of various games. On Tuesdays and Wednesdays, he gets to hear the latest on games that aren’t progressing well.

This information comes via a rather long three-way discussion between Iwata, Miyamoto, and the Hobo Nikkan Itoi Shimbun website’s owner, Shigesato Itoi. Our readers probably know him better as the creator of the Earthbound series.