Shuntaro Furukawa has pointed to Super Mario Kart for SNES as being responsible for joining Nintendo.
In 2018, the departure of Tatsumi Kimishima left us with a new name at the top of Nintendo. Shuntaro Furukawa he became the new president of the Big N and the new face to lead the company after Kimishima and the late Satoru Iwata, who managed to leave an indelible mark on the company and on the players.
Since then, Furukawa has not wanted to be a protagonist in the different announcements that the company has carried out, although it has been encouraged more lately to come to the fore. In fact, in an interview with the Japanese media Nikkei (translated by nintendo-everything), has left us a very curious anecdote about how did you join nintendoin addition to revealing more aspects related to his first steps in the video game sector.
A student recommended Super Mario Kart to meShuntaro FurukawaThe president has discussed his relationship with the company and how they bonded in the 1990s. At that time, he had a Super Famicom (SNES) in his possession, but he was not interested in Nintendo games, but he was more attracted to third-party titles. Everything changed when a friend recommended a very specific racing game: Super Mario Kart.
“It was a complete coincidence that I took the Nintendo Job System test,” explains Furukawa. “When I entered college in 1990, the Super Famicom was in full swing. I had one, but I was more interested in games from other companies like Nobunaga’s Ambition or baseball games like Super Batter Up. I didn’t really play a lot of Nintendo titles.”
“One day a younger student in my tennis club told me ‘you have to play this, you’re wasting your time not playing it’. The game he recommended to me was Super Mario Kart 1992,” continues the president. “It was the first time I had played a Nintendo game in a long time, and it was a lot of fun!”
My life would have been very differentShuntaro Furukawa“I remember thinking that, after all, this company I was doing great things. So I applied for an apprenticeship through the forms that appeared in job search magazines. If I hadn’t played Mario Kart at the time, I could have had a very different lifeFurukawa concludes.
Shuntaro Furukawa joined the company when he was only 22 years old, in April 1994, although his work during that period has not been specified. The Nikkei newspaper stated at the time that worked for ten years in Germany and, already in 2012, he began to hold management positions. He first did it as an external director of The Pokémon Company, and then as general manager, later becoming director and supervisor of the administration and analysis division.
As president of Nintendo, we have heard him on more than one occasion discuss the company’s goals with his community. He has assured that they seek make players smile, in addition to carrying out initiatives to keep developers and those working in supply chains happy. At the moment, at the business level do not plan to acquire studies as other multinationals have done, since Furukawa himself thinks that he would not contribute anything to Nintendo itself today.
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