Satoru Iwata is not your typical Japanese company president. When he talks about the games his company produces, the 49-year-old Nintendo CEO's eyes positively twinkle with mischief and excitement.

Nintendo employees speak with hushed reverence about their occasional meetings with the man, about his inspirational qualities, about his power to make them believe in ideas they’d previously found far-fetched or plain stupid.

His partnership with Shigeru Miyamoto, the creative force behind Super Mario, Donkey Kong, Zelda, Nintendogs and much more, is legendary within the games community, and unique within the industry. You want to know where the Wii came from? The DS? Wii Fit? Look no further.

Iwata is only the fourth president in the company’s history. His selection in 2002 as the successor to Hiroshi Yamauchi, who had been leading Nintendo since 1949, was – to say the least – a shock, a real slap in the face to a corporate culture that has traditionally valued age and experience over youth and vitality.

In person, Iwata does not disappoint. Backstage at the E3 video games conference in Los Angeles, he bounds to his feet to make his greetings before settling back ready for questioning, a smile flitting constantly across his face.

He seems more relaxed than any CEO I’ve met, but then he has good reason to. When he took over the reins at Nintendo in 2002, the company reported 65.7bn yen (then £350 million) in profit, a disappointing figure blamed on poor console sales and a feeling that the video game “fad” had run its course. By this year, that figure had risen almost tenfold, to 555bn yen (£3.7bn at today's rates). Not bad for a man with no formal business training.

“I was originally an engineer,” he tells me, “and I joined a small company called HAL after university… In 1992, HAL was facing a financial crisis, and I was appointed president in order to help reconstruct it. At that time I was completely unable to read financial statements. I was a game developer. So I was forced to study the financial aspects of running a company.”

Having turned HAL around, with the help of Nintendo, Iwata felt honour-bound to repay Yamauchi when the latter offered him the chance to become Nintendo’s youngest board member in 2000.

“Of course, I never imagined that I would become president,” he recalls with another of his smiles.

And what about Nintendo’s resurgence since he took over? Was that down to brilliant planning, or outrageous good luck?

“We were very lucky,” he replies. “The situation today is far beyond the achievement of any one person. When I was appointed president, I started to wonder about the future of the video game industry. At that time, the market in Japan was on the decline, and if we had carried on doing exactly the same thing, it would have been difficult to maintain sales. We might even have gone into terminal decline.

“I really thought that we needed to attract new players to games, and persuade those who had quit playing to take it up again. That was actually the starting point for us, to think about the strategy of user expansion.

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