curl-6 on 12 July 2020
You can tell a lot about a leader too in how they deal with hard times; Iwata may have presided over the Wii U/3DS slump, but in his final days he organized what would go on to be an earth-shattering comeback, as well as taking a personal pay cut when profits slowed rather than lay off workers.
Yamauchi by contrast seemed to dig his heels in when the going got tough; he oversaw Nintendo's dominance in the NES era and the SNES's victory in the 4th gen, but Nintendo's decline from industry leader in the 3rd/4th gen to basically irrelevant in the 6th gen also happened on his watch, and it was Iwata who ultimately reversed this downward spiral.
