News: A Tribute to Iwata Satoru, Dead at Fifty-five

Today Nintendo announced the death of Iwata Satoru on July 11th 2015, from a cancerous growth in his bile duct. It was this same condition which prevented his presence at E3 last year, for which he had undergone surgery. Born on December 6th 1959 (Shōwa 34), Iwata died at the too-young age of fifty-five, making his thirteen years the shortest reign of any President of Nintendo. Since 2002 his radical vision for the future has repeatedly redefined the company's position in relation to the rest of the market, and set it above and beyond the scope of competing developers. Nintendo has lost its greatest President, and the fans have lost one of their best friends.

Iwata is someone that we cannot write about impersonally. Composing an exhaustive list of all the games he contributed to in life is likely impossible; Iwata was a constant presence working alongside Nintendo's development staff even after ascending to the position of President, and for every game he worked on there lies a story and more uncredited work behind it. Several of his contributions only became known years after the fact, and there's likely still more that will never be public knowledge. While Iwata is famous for reprogramming EarthBound from scratch midway through its development, for this editor Iwata's greatest accomplishments were in the late 90s and early 2000s. We first came to know Iwata through his work on Super Smash Bros. Melee, on which many sleepovers and afternoons were spent. Even now the arguments over whether Marth or Roy was better still come to mind. The handheld Kirby games filled many long car rides across the United States, and in each of his games a small piece of Iwata's soul touched our lives. His revolutionary direction as President fundamentally changed Nintendo into a developer for more than just gamers, achieving a level of proliferation with the Wii that the press could never have anticipated. His policies of openness between developers and fans lead to the creation of Iwata Asks, a column hosted on Nintendo's official site in which he would interview game developers about their upcoming projects. With Iwata gone, the future of the column is uncertain.

Iwata was the first President of Nintendo to cut his teeth on programming video games before ever ascending to the position, but what characterized his career most strongly was how he retained a developer's mindset even after succeeding President Yamauchi. Setting him apart from the distant Yamauchi was that while Yamauchi died having never played a video game, Iwata had hands-on experience with both playing and developing games. To prevent new titles from languishing in obscurity, he gave his seal of approval to games that would have otherwise struggled to find funding. (Of note is that several years prior to his presidency, Iwata was one of the executive producers for Doshin the Giant. Could such a bizarre game have ever existed if Iwata and Miyamoto hadn't done the executive coordination to get it funded?) His constant involvement with a huge variety of Nintendo's titles left Iwata's mark everywhere. The compression tools he created doubled the content of Pokémon Gold & Silver, and the debugging work he did over the course of three weeks on Melee was some of the most important ever done in the field. His code now lives on forever in the screens of the annual Apex and EVO tournaments.

Following his sudden departure, Iwata's place is being filled by representative directors Takeda Genyo and Miyamoto Shigeru. Our prayers are with them during this difficult time. Several insensitive comments have already been made regarding Iwata's death and this year's E3. Please be respectful of the Iwata family's grief in the days ahead, as well as that of his friends' and coworkers'.