Nintendo CEO named ‘Person of the Year’

An interactive entertainment web site named Satoru Iwata, Nintendo CEO, as its “Person of the Year” for reversing his company’s fortunes—from a struggling console maker and game developer to the market leader it is today.

Iwata’s key to greatness – the Nintendo Wii — became cultural phenomenon that swept the world. The web site Next-Gen provides the reason behind its choice:

“The story of 2007 was for all intents and purposes the story of Nintendo. It was the story of the Wii, the year’s biggest cultural phenomenon by any metric, and how it remained perpetually sold out no matter how many Nintendo could muster its factories to make. It was the story of competition caught flat-footed, how other hardware manufacturers worked to steal some small portion of Nintendo’s new market even as third parties scrambled to get something, anything out on Wii. It was the story of Satoru Iwata, a man Barron’s listed as one of the world’s best CEOs, and how he led his company back to market leadership.”

Iwata beat Activision Blizzard president and CEO Robert Kotick, BioShock designer Ken Levine, Harmonix CEO Alex Rigopoulos, and ‘Halo 3′ developer Bungie Studio head Harold Ryan for the web site’s top honors.