Satoru Iwata

Satoru Iwata, who had been suffering from health issues for over a year, died on July 11, 2015, at the age of 55, due to complications from a tumor surgery he had in June 2014. He is survived by his wife, Kayoko.

Satoru Iwata was born on December 6, 1959, in Sapporo, Japan. His father, a politician, served as a prefectural official there and was later elected as the mayor of Muroran.

Satoru Iwata became interested in computers and video games while in middle school, and started creating simple games in his HP-65 programmable calculator during his junior year at Hokkaido Sapporo South High School.

In 1978, he enrolled into Tokyo Institute of Technology with major in computer science and purchased his first computer, a Commodore PET, which he later disassembled to study how it worked.

In 1980, while still studying at the university, Satoru Iwata was invited to the game development company, HAL Laboratory, Inc, to work as a part-time programmer. As part of the company, he developed a peripheral device to enable older computers to display latest graphics, which helped them become the first company to obtain a license with Namco for developing games.

Following his graduation in 1982, he became the fifth full-time employee at HAL, as well as its only programmer. The next year, he became the company's coordinator of software production and helped it reach a deal with Nintendo to produce games for the newly released Nintendo Entertainment System (NES).

Starting with a port of the 1982 arcade game ‘Joust’, he went on to work on games like ‘Balloon Fight’, ‘NES Open Tournament Golf’, ‘EarthBound’, and the ‘Kirby’ games. He even created his own data compression method for ‘Open Tournament Golf’, a game that several major developers initially declined to produce because of the difficulty to store large amount of data on NES cartridge.

In 1983, with the support of Nintendo's then-President, Hiroshi Yamauchi, he was made the president of HAL, at a time when the company was on the verge of bankruptcy. He successfully recovered the company from its ¥1.5 billion debt within six years, often polishing his management skills by reading books or taking advice from experienced professionals.

Even before joining Nintendo officially, he helped create a set of compression tools for the games ‘Pokémon Gold and Silver’, released in November 1999. He also assisted in porting the code for the battle system of ‘Pokémon Red and Green’ into ‘Pokémon Stadium’ for the Nintendo 64 within a week.

The president of The Pokemon Company, Tsunekazu Ishihara, has credited him for popularizing ‘Pokémon’ in the Western markets. He was also involved in the development of ‘Super Smash Bros.’ for Nintendo 64.

In 2000, he joined Nintendo as the General Manager of the Corporate Planning Division and became a member of its board of directors. He immediately focused on reducing the cost and duration of game production without affecting quality, and contributed significantly to the company’s 20 and 41 percent profit increase during the next two years.

Following the retirement of Hiroshi Yamauchi on May 24, 2002, he became Nintendo's fourth president, and the first one not related to the Yamauchi family. Right after joining as the president, he met directly with the heads of various departments of the company and its employees, breaking Yamauchi’s practice of holding only an annual speech.

He observed that to be competitive, they have been focusing on hardware-heavy consoles, which satisfied only a small group of hardcore gamers and made the process of developing games increasingly difficult. He subsequently adopted a ‘blue ocean’ strategy which, instead of competing in terms of technical specification of the device, attempted to make the overall gaming experience more entertaining for the average user.