About a decade ago, Bobby Kotick, chief executive of the video games company Activision Blizzard, flew to Kyoto to visit Nintendo. He was shown to a room with a television on which was displayed an image of a pond with bubbles floating to the surface. Satoru Iwata, Nintendo’s president, handed him a games controller called a wand and guided his hand to cast a virtual fishing line.

大约10年前，视频游戏公司动视暴雪(Activision Blizzard)首席执行官鲍比科蒂克(Bobby Kotick)乘机飞往京都参观任天堂(Nintendo)。他被带到一个有电视的房间，电视上显示的是一个池塘的画面，水泡正浮向水面。任天堂总裁岩田聪(Satoru Iwata)交给他一个被称为“魔杖”的游戏控制器，然后引导他的手抛出虚拟的钓鱼线。

As Mr Kotick drew back the wand, observed by Iwata and Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo’s chief games designer, a fish popped out of the pond. “I remember the delight on their faces as they saw me realise that this would change the face of entertainment — these two guys who had the instinct, the courage and the vision to do something radically different,” he says.

在岩田聪和任天堂首席游戏设计师宫本茂(Shigeru Miyamoto)的注视下，科蒂克把魔杖向后拉，一条鱼跳出了池塘。他说：“我记得当他们看到我意识到这将改变娱乐的面貌时，他们的脸上露出开心的表情，这是两个有天分、勇气和梦想去做一些彻底不同的事情的人。”

Iwata, who this week died of cancer at 55, was often regarded as the business partner to a creative genius — the Roy Disney to Mr Miyamoto’s Walt, the Domenico de Sole to Mr Miyamoto’s Tom Ford at Gucci, or the business half of Steve Jobs’s brain at Apple. That understates his role in guiding Nintendo to an extraordinary coup with the launch of the Wii console in 2006.

岩田聪本周因癌症去世，终年55岁。他经常被视为创意天才的商业搭档——如果宫本茂是沃尔特迪斯尼(Walt Disney)，岩田聪就是罗伊迪斯尼(Roy Disney)，如果宫本茂是古驰(Gucci)的汤姆輠祹(Tom Ford)，岩田聪就是多米尼克德∠尔(Domenico De Sole)，或者如果宫本茂是苹果(Apple)的史蒂夫吠布斯(Steve Jobs)，那么岩田聪就是乔布斯大脑中的商业半球。这低估了他在引导任天堂取得非凡成功方面的作用，2006年，任天堂推出游戏机Wii，大获成功。

Putting a low-tech console, running quirky games for family entertainment, up against the high-definition technology of Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3 was like entering a Fiat

用运行家庭娱乐搞怪游戏的低科技含量游戏机，与微软(Microsoft) Xbox 360以及索尼(Sony) PlayStation 3使用的高清技术竞争，就像是开一辆菲亚特500(Fiat 500)参加一级方程式(Formula One)赛车。游戏开发商Mind Candy创始人迈克尔阿克顿史密斯(Michael Acton Smith)表示，这样的竞争相当于用“乐趣、魔力和快乐对决冷冰冰的处理能力。”

500 in a Formula One race. The contest amounted to “fun, magic and joy against brute processing power,” says Michael Acton Smith, founder of the games publisher Mind Candy.

乐趣、魔力和快乐最终取胜，它们是贯穿《超级马里奥兄弟》(Super Mario Bros)、《塞尔达传说》(The Legend of Zelda)、《Wii运动》(Wii Sports)等任天堂游戏的特点。我参加了当时在洛杉矶举办的E3视频游戏展，当宫本茂穿着魔法师服装走上舞台时，我看到观众为之倾倒。索尼PlayStation 3使用的多线程芯片无法与其媲美。

Fun, magic and joy — the qualities of Nintendo games from Super Mario Bros and The Legend of Zelda to Wii Sports — won. I attended the E3 video games show in Los Angeles at the time, and saw the adulation when Mr Miyamoto walked on stage in a wizard costume. Sony’s multi-threaded chip for the PlayStation 3 could not match that.

游戏产业听上去并不重要，因此与乔布斯挽救苹果或郭士纳(Louis Gerstner)拯救IBM等备受追捧的大转折故事相比，任天堂在岩田聪带领下的复苏很容易被忽视。然而这项成就同样具有革命性，这是一次冲破万难后的成功，它将视频游戏从青少年的小众爱好变成以家庭为导向的乐趣。

The games industry does not sound important, so Nintendo’s revival under Iwata is easy to ignore compared with feted turnrounds such as Jobs’s rescue of Apple or Louis Gerstner’s of IBM. It was equally revolutionary, though — a triumph against the odds that turned video gaming from a niche hobby of teenagers and young adults into family-oriented fun.

与乔布斯一样，岩田聪和宫本茂是凭借相信自己的本能（和公司的历史积累）、并坚决无视其他人而取得成功的。英国游戏企业家、Midoki公司和Playdemic公司董事长伊恩利文斯通(Ian Livingstone)表示：“任天堂一直都在走自己的路。他们从未妥协，也从不在乎他们的竞争对手在做什么。”

Like Jobs, the two men achieved this by trusting in their instincts — and the company’s heritage — and obstinately ignoring everyone else. “Nintendo has always gone its own way. They have never compromised and never cared what their competitors are doing,”says Ian Livingstone, the UK games entrepreneur who is chairman of Midoki and Playdemic.

任天堂的固执己见最近付出了巨大代价。岩田聪拒绝让他的品牌出现在手机上，而坚持其“围墙花园”传统：玩家必须购买该公司的游戏机才能玩该公司的游戏，这导致任天堂受到PlayStation 4以及休闲游戏的挤压，比如Mind Candy的《莫西怪兽》(Moshi Monsters)和现在由微软所有的《我的世界》(Minecraft)。

Nintendo’s obstinacy has recently carried a high price. Iwata’s refusal to let his brands appear on mobile phones, instead sticking with the “walled garden” tradition of gamers having to buy its devices to play the company’s games, resulted in it being squeezed between PlayStation 4 and casual games such as Mind Candy’s Moshi Monsters and Minecraft , now owned by Microsoft.

在经历了3年的亏损后，岩田聪在去世前逆转了战略，他签署协议，让任天堂的游戏角色出现在移动游戏应用上，以及环球影业(Universal)的主题公园内。在宫本茂和董事竹田玄洋(Genyo Takeda)新一届领导层的带领下，马里奥兄弟和塞尔达将挣脱束缚。

After three years of losses, Iwata re瘀攀爀猀攀搀 course just before his death, signing deals to put Nintendo characters on mobile gaming apps, as well as in Universal theme parks. The Mario brothers and Zelda are to escape captivity under the new leadership of Mr Miyamoto and Genyo Takeda, a director.

任天堂的企业发展之路一直像是坐过山车，它拒绝在情感和商业模式上妥协，这既将公司带到过惊人的高点，也曾使其陷入低谷。它在上世纪90年代遭到了世嘉(Sega)推出的电玩游戏《刺猬索尼克》(Sonic the Hedgehog)的伏击，后来世嘉由于在梦工厂(Dreamcast)游戏机上的失败陷入危机，并将业务缩减至仅做游戏出版商。岩田聪开始掌舵任天堂时，许多分析师曾预测任天堂也将输给索尼和微软。

Nintendo always was a roller-coaster enterprise, its refusal to compromise on its sensibility and its business model leading both to stunning highs and deep lows. It was ambushed by Sega with Sonic the Hedgehog in the 1990s before Sega faltered with the failure of its Dreamcast console and retreated to being purely a games publisher. Many analysts expected Nintendo to also succumb to Sony and Microsoft at[AT?] the time that Iwata took charge.

然而，岩田聪明白一件竞争对手不明白的事：魔力可以打败技术。任天堂证明了自己能够利用搞怪、有趣的人物以及复杂的游戏设计，超越其早期游戏设备（1985年的“红白机”(NES)和1989年的掌上游戏机Game Boy）的技术限制。

Iwata, however, understood one thing that his competitors did not: that magic beats technology. Nintendo had proved able to transcend the limited technology of its earlier devices — the Nintendo Entertainment System console in 1985 and the Game Boy handheld in 1989 — with quirky, amusing characters and intricate games design.

到21世纪头十年之初，游戏机之战已经聚焦于速度和高清图像方面。索尼和微软都认为制胜之道在于，为射击和体育游戏（如Halo和Madden NFL等主要是男性“核心玩家”玩的游戏）提供更逼真、更身临其境的体验。视频游戏行业开始围绕高清标准缠斗。

By the early 2000s, the console wars had narrowed to speed and high-definition images. Both Sony and Microsoft thought the way to win was to offer more realistic and immersive versions of shooting and sports games such as Halo and Madden NFL, played largely by male “core gamers”. The video games industry became tangled up in a high-definition standards battle.

岩田聪知道，任天堂注定会输掉这轮竞争，他把目标完全转移到了别处：扩大市场规模。一名玩家买PlayStation 3游戏机要花499美元，而岩田聪卖给家庭的Wii游戏机只售249美元，还附带网球和保龄球等游戏。他提供的是迷人、轻松的娱乐活动，而非惨烈的战争。

Knowing that Nintendo was bound to lose this contest, Iwata aimed at something else entirely: expanding the size of the market. Instead of one person having to pay $499 for a PlayStation 3, he sold the family a Wii for $249 with games such as tennis and bowling. Rather than crushing wars, he offered charming light entertainment.

即使在任天堂陷入当前麻烦之际，他的真知灼见仍被证明具有洞察力。大多数游戏都不是战斗类游戏，大多数人追求的是乐趣和娱乐，不论在游戏设备上还是手机上。重要的是游戏的魔力，而不是游戏机的带宽。