Wii hero named "person of the year", as PS3 and Xbox 360 fans roll their eyes

Nintendo’s latest President and CEO, Satoru Iwata, has taken the top honors in Next-Gen.biz’s annual list of the top 25 people of the year.

While it may not be as prestigious an honor as being named one of Time Magazine’s most influential people, as Nintendo video game designer Shigeru Miyamoto was in 2006, it is, nonetheless, a great achievement – especially in light of Nintendo’s dire predicament of just a few years ago.

While PS3 and Xbox 360 fans may be rolling their eyes, this achievement speaks of the general trend that is forming in the gaming industry.

Satoru Iwata took over as Nintendo’s President and CEO after the retirement of Hiroshi Yamauchi in the middle of 2002. At the time Nintendo was falling from its former high point in the industry. The Gamecube had been released only months before and was already meeting with much criticism. Of course, the Gamecube would eventually be seen as either a failure or merely a modest success depending upon who you speak to, but one thing cannot be denied, Satoru Iwata was able to turn the falling Nintendo into, quite possibly, the most dominant force in gaming today.

With the release of the Nintendo DS in 2004 the company set itself onto a brand new path for a video game company. With the “Blue Ocean Strategy” Nintendo drew itself out of the traditional race to create more powerful systems with each generation, instead focusing on innovation and gameplay mechanics that would allow their system and games to be played by nearly anyone. This strategy was highly questionable at the time, but with the continuing success of the DS and the more recent explosion of the Wii it seems as though no one can deny that Iwata chose the right path.

Both the Wii and DS are the best selling systems in both of their respective markets, making this the first time that Nintendo has been at the top of both the handheld and home gaming markets since 1994 when the Game Boy and Nintendo Entertainment System were in charge.

In the span of only five years Satoru Iwata has taken Nintendo from a company that many speculated would go the way of Sega, to the best selling and most profitable company of the big three. And with the Wii still selling out nation-wide, and the DS outselling every other system on the market, Nintendo and Satoru Iwata seem to have only begun.

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