I sometimes imagine what gaming would look like without the Nintendo. There's an alternate timeline where Atari crashed the market from bad practices and gaming for the masses was written off as a fad that had passed it times. Arcades would remain as a novelty for getting kids money and computer gaming would serve as an interest mostly for rich kids and indulgent suburbanites.

But Nintendo put a useless robot and a barely useful zap gun in a box with their video game system and tricked American retailers into carrying something that was considered nonviable by convincing them it was more of a toy than the next Atari. 

I'm a big fan of video game history, and my main issue with this book is that Iwata doesn't seem to appreciate how interested people are in the aspects of that industry he witnessed firsthand.

This book certainly has some fun anecdotes, like Nintendo asking his team at HAL to put more work in on Kirby to make it the icon it is today. But a huge chunk of these essays are more like seminars are how to manage employees. By many accounts Iwata was a compassionate boss and a decent person to work for, but I don't think that's necessarily the information people came to a book written by him looking for. Advice on how to manage people and run a business has its own section at the bookstore. This is well-worn territory at this point. 

Iwata is sitting on a gold mine, but he'd rather tell us about how he interviews his employees regularly. I am not the audience for this. It's less that this is badly written and more that it feels like a wasted opportunity.