Satoru Iwata, Nintendo CEO
Position: 19 Last year: Not ranked
Why? Claiming new territory with the Wii console
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Iwata is the Nintendo chief who turned the company's fortunes round. In the early 1990s, Nintendo led the global games console market. But its position soon slipped with the advent of the PlayStation and then the Xbox.
By 2002, when Iwata took charge as only the company's fourth president in almost 120 years, Nintendo's GameCube was trailing in third behind rival platforms from Sony and Microsoft.
Under Iwata's stewardship, Nintendo is now in the lead. Over the past 12 months, Nintendo has clawed back a sizeable market share, in the UK at least, with its latest offering - the Wii. For the uninitiated, it's pronounced 'We'.
The Wii differs from other consoles in that it comes with tracking technology that allows players to interact physically with the pictures on the screen, so they can actually fight with opponents or swing a tennis racket, rather than just pressing buttons on a joypad.
The judges were impressed by Iwata's role in these innovations, concluding he has done much to take computer gaming out of the exclusive realm of the 17-year-old boy's bedroom and make it a more of a unisex social activity.
As one judge put it, Iwata's Nintendo has done for gaming what Apple did for music.
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