It wasn’t a runaway success in Japan, but positive word of mouth led to worldwide sales of nearly 20 million units, making it one of the best-selling games on the DS.
The Brain Age series launched in Japan in 2005 and the rest of the world starting in 2006. Kawashima’s approval to make a video game based on his ideas. Ryuta Kawashima, the author behind Train Your Brain, a multi-million-selling book all about how regular calculations and mental exercises could improve your smarts. Iwata’s first console launch was the DS and on the day the handheld launched, he met with Dr. But there’s a sidebar to that big picture that was arguably instrumental to the mid-2000s turnaround: brain games.Ī part of Iwata’s mission as he ran Nintendo was to expand the gaming audience - a central focus of the “blue ocean” strategy that fed into the intuitive touch controls of the DS and the motion controls of the Wii. Iwata led the charge of the Nintendo DS and Wii, and the company came roaring back only to face even worse losses with the Wii U before finding unprecedented success with the Switch.
For the first time in their video game life, Nintendo faced the very real and present danger of losing their place in the industry, especially after Sega departed from the hardware business after the failure of the Dreamcast.
For as beloved as the GameCube was among a sect of Nintendo fans, it just wasn’t working in the mainstream. That wasn’t as shocking, but the emergence of the Xbox from industry newcomer Microsoft was potentially more concerning. Sony, who came onto the scene in the 1990s amidst the fallout of a doomed relationship with Nintendo, was leading the market with the runaway success of the PlayStation 2. While the company still had the handheld market cornered with the Game Boy Advance, they were firmly in third place in the home console space. Iwata was handed the reins during a tumultuous time.
In his stead stepped Satoru Iwata, a developer-turned-manager who was born a decade after Yamauchi took over Nintendo. In 2002, Hiroshi Yamauchi retired as President of the company, a title he held for more than 50 years. Nintendo in the early 2000s was going through immense change.