In a frank interview, Nintendo company President Satoru Iwata explains how he turned the company around from 'dying a slow death' at great risk.

Nintendo's company President Satoru Iwata has given some revealing answers to German news site Spiegel.de. Speaking on Nintendo's state before the introduction of the Wii and DS, Iwata has said that he was sure the company would not have lasted for much longer without big changes.

"I was sure that if we continued down the path in which we were heading, Nintendo would have died a slow death. At that time the market had been in decline for six years -- not only for Nintendo, but for the games industry in Japan as a whole. So we had to change things and attract new customers."

Was he sure that the gambles he took on the Wii and DS would pay off?

"I was lucky that it worked so fast. For a long time I was not sure what would happen first: Would success come or would I get fired?"

Finally, speaking about the 2008 E3 conference, he responded that he new 'core' gamers were upset there had been an emphasis on 'casual' titles.

"We understand that people were disappointed [...] We wanted to show software that was launching this year and in early 2009. We have never neglected our core games and we still have development teams working on these games, however we need longer to complete these games and we are not launching them in early 2009. So we couldn't show them at E3 this year."

Well, we'd kinda guessed there'd be no new Mario, Zelda or Pikmin before Spring 2009, but it makes sense that as it takes years to develop the next title in these big franchises, this simply wasn't the year to show off such titles.