Satoru Iwata

Satoru Iwata

Date of Birth: December 6, 1959

Date of Death: July 11, 2015

Home Town: Sapporo, Japan

Development Teams

HAL Laboratory

Satoru Iwata was the fourth president of Nintendo. His strategy for the Gamecube increased their sales by 41%.

Biography

Iwata was born in Sapporo, Japan. Iwata showed an early interest in video games. In high school, he learned to program and started creating his own games. His games were on an electronic calculator and he shared them with his friends.

After high school, he entered Tokyo Institute of Technology and majored in Computer Science. While in college, he was hired part-time by HAL Laboratory. His family was unhappy with his decision. Iwata once commented, "My father didn't talk to me for about six months after I joined HAL. They must have thought I was joining a religious cult."

After his college graduation in 1982, he was hired full-time at HAL Laboratory. In 1983, he became the company's coordinator of software production. At times, he also helped Nintendo on a free-lance basis. While at HAL, he helped with Balloon Fight, Earthbound, and Kirby. In 1993, he became president of HAL Laboratory. He was also known for the help that he provided in the development of Pokémon: Gold and Silver Versions. Apparently, he was vital to figuring out how to fit enough data into the Game Boy Color cartridge to allow the developers to include the entire region of Kanto from the first generation games into Gold and Silver.

In 2000, Iwata became the head of Nintendo's corporate planning division. When Hiroshi Yamauchi retired in 2002, Iwata was chosen as his successor. Afterwards, he continued to help HAL out as a correspondent and occasional artist. Though he was president, he still has had a role in the development of certain games, including Super Mario Sunshine, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Metroid Prime and many others. Since 2006, Iwata has been responsible for insightful developer commentary on various Wii and Nintendo DS games with his Iwata Asks columns.

As Nintendo suffered from financial disappointments with the Nintendo 3DS and Wii U, Iwata ended up halving his salary in 2011 and 2014. This was done as an apology for his perceived failure and as an alternative to laying off more Nintendo employees. In 2013, he also became CEO of Nintendo of America. He had Nintendo stop making public press conferences at E3, and instead he had them confine themselves to smaller events and streamed video announcements.

Iwata later created the [[[amiibo]]s, which were a financial success, and he also helped with the development of the mobile game Pokémon Go. He spent the last months of his life helping to develop the Nintendo Switch.

He had health problems originating from a tumor that was discovered in his bile duct. His declining health led to him making less public appearances. He had surgery to remove the tumor in 2014, but in 2015 it resurfaced, and it caused his death at the age of 55.

Awards and Honors

• Named one of World's Top CEOs by Barron's Online.
• Following his death, he was posthumously granted Lifetime Achievement Awards from the 2015 Golden Joystick Awards and the 2016 DICE Awards.

Tributes

After his death, tribute has been paid to Iwata in several Nintendo games.

• One of the last games he worked on was Star Fox Zero. It was released the year after his death, and the credits contained a tribute to him which stated, "This game is dedicated to our wingman who fell in battle".
• There is another speculated tribute in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, another game that Iwata was helping with at the time of his death. One NPC bearing a resemblance to Iwata (mostly in his hair and glasses) tells Link about a place called Satori Mountain. This mountain is home to a mystical being called the Lord of the Forest, with its Hyrule Compendium entry saying that the being was the reincarnation of a sage and was also known by the name of Satori. Notably, Satori is a Buddhist term for enlightenment that is derived from the word 'satoru'.
• It has been discovered that the Nintendo Switch has an emulated version of Golf hidden in its firmware that can only be discovered by performing certain hand motions (which are similar to ones that Iwata often performed during Nintendo Directs) when the Switch's clock is set to July 11th, which was the day of his death. Golf had been programmed by Iwata as one of his first projects.
• In Pokémon: Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon, when visiting the game's Gamefreak building with Pokémon from the second generation, one of the NPCs will reminisce about the development of Gold/Silver and mention how an "amazing guy" made it possible to fit everything into the game.

Trivia

• Iwata was the first president of Nintendo who was unrelated to Nintendo founder Fusajiro Yamauchi.
• He appears in two of the Wario Ware games. In WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$!, he can be seen on Wario's TV in a break between microgames in the Introduction stage. In Wario Ware: Smooth Moves, he is the manager of a videogame store, and also appears as a Mii in the ending credits.