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A Funny Wii Story: The Time Satoru Iwata Squatted for WarioWare

A quick pose prompt in WarioWare: Smooth Moves inspired a dance-like concept—and led Satoru Iwata to demonstrate a squat with a Wii Remote on his head.
Length2 min Posted Quest giverVGSources Team
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A funny Wii story from the making of WarioWare: Smooth Moves involves Nintendo president Satoru Iwata taking a game instruction completely literally: during a presentation, he put a Wii Remote on his head and squatted. Designer Yoshio Sakamoto recalled that the moment made the team laugh and lifted its morale.

Why WarioWare: Smooth Moves needed quick instructions

WarioWare: Smooth Moves is built around microgames that give players only a few seconds to react. The development team had to explain not just what to do, but how to hold the Wii Remote. Yoshio Sakamoto, a designer on the game, described adding brief prompts such as “Hold the Remote like this.”

According to Nintendo’s developer interview with Sakamoto and Iwata, someone on the team compared the sequence of poses to learning the forms of a traditional Japanese dance. That comparison helped shape the game’s dance-like concept: players would quickly take a pose, then see whether it matched the microgame’s demand.

Iwata follows the squat instruction to the letter

While presenting the game to the team, Iwata acted out one of the instructions. As he recalled it: “I just held the Remote on top of my head and started squatting.” The unexpected demonstration struck the developers as funny. Sakamoto said it gave the team a morale boost.

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WarioWare: Smooth Moves (Renewed)
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The interview also records Sakamoto’s description of players squatting in front of people supervising product testing because they were following the game’s instructions exactly. The humor comes from the contrast: a very short control prompt can make a roomful of people perform an oddly formal pose in earnest.

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Keep the joke safe when playing Wii

The story is about a development presentation and the game’s pose instructions, not a documented mishap in a particular family’s living room. If you play the original Wii hardware, Nintendo’s Wii safety guidance says to wear and tighten the wrist strap, hold the Wii Remote firmly, and avoid excessive motion. Give yourself room to move, too.

There is one specific strap detail worth knowing if you are checking old hardware. Nintendo’s official notice, first published December 15, 2006 and updated October 2, 2024, says the original strap cord was 0.6 mm thick and describes a stronger 1 mm replacement. The notice says Nintendo had received reports of some cords breaking after motion beyond what it anticipated; it does not give a failure count or rate. Nintendo says consoles shipped in early December 2006 already had the newer strap, and its support guidance advises checking the strap version before ordering a replacement. See Nintendo’s strap notice for the original Japanese instructions.

Quick Recap

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