A CEO stares silently at a bunch of bananas on a brightly lit stage. The same CEO locks himself away for a weekend to write code that saves a friend's struggling game. Both were Satoru Iwata, the fourth president of Nintendo and the first person outside the Yamauchi family to run the company. This episode looks at how a programmer approached corporate leadership like a system to be debugged, and what happened when empathy and fun became his core business metrics.

We follow Iwata from Sapporo, where he washed dishes to buy an HP-65 programmable calculator and dismantled a Commodore PET to study its MOS 6502 processor, to HAL Laboratory, where he invented a compression method to fit 18 holes of golf on an NES cartridge and later became president to rescue the company from 1.5 billion yen in debt. Then Nintendo: interviewing 40 department head ...