1. Satoru Iwata Passes Away
In June 2014, Nintendo President and CEO Satoru Iwata had a tumor found in his bile duct during a routine physical. This ailment not only kept in home during E3 2014 but for more than four months as he recovered. When he returned, he was noticeably thinner but was feeling healthier than he had been. Unfortunately, complications arose again late in June of this year, and on July 11th, Satoru Iwata died. He was 55.
The story of Satoru Iwata is the stuff that business dreams are made of. He went from being one of five employees for a small company — and helping grow that company into the top level developer it is today — to being the CEO of a successful multinational corporation by the time he was 42. But when you look at his life as a whole, it wasn’t just leadership skills or a drive to succeed that he had; Iwata had a natural talent for this business.
When he was in high school, he saved up enough money from allowance and a dish-washing job to purchase an HP-65, the first programmable calculator. And he would use this calculator to start creating his own games. A while later, he obtained a Commodore PET, which he dismantled in order to study the parts on the computer, finding an MOS 6502 — a CPU that would later be used on the Nintendo Entertainment System. As he attended the Tokyo Institute of Technology — where his engineering professor praised him not only for his speed but accuracy of his work — he worked as an intern at Commodore Japan, which afforded him the chance to work with computers and learn things that the masses wouldn’t know for a while. He even created a club where he and his friends would create and code games at his apartments, which resulted in his place being referred to as “Game Center Iwata” by other students.
When he graduated from college, Iwata went to work full-time with HAL Laboratory, which did not go over well with his parents. As a matter of fact, his father, who was mayor of Muroran at the time, refused to speak with him for half a year. One of the reasons for that is that HAL had only five employees at the time with Iwata being the company’s only programmer.
But despite the small size of the company, Iwata worked hard to make them a success, with the first game he worked on being a port of the 1982 arcade hit Joust. Around this time, he helped create and foster a relationship between HAL and Nintendo, a relationship that continues to this day. This partnership combined with Iwata’s work ethic and passion for the industry seemed to draw the eye of Hiroshi Yamauchi, the long time Nintendo President and CEO. Call it speculation (if it hasn’t already been confirmed), but I believe Yamauchi saw a potential successor in Iwata. In 1993, when HAL was in financial trouble (¥1.5 billion in debt), it was Yamauchi that insisted that Iwata lead the company through the issue. And thanks to a combination of help from Yamauchi and seeking knowledge from books and others to improve his business acumen, HAL would erase all its debts before the new millennium.
As for the programming side of things, Iwata showed his skill as he helped create Kirby with Masahiro Sakurai, was the lead programmer for Nintendo’s Balloon Fight, and assisted in Shigesato Itoi’s wonderfully strange Mother series. He was also instrumental in two mega hits for Nintendo, Super Smash Bros. and Pokemon. As a matter of fact, Iwata was key in the localization plan for Pokemon Red and Blue, was able to compress Gold and Silver down far enough in order to add in the old generation’s Kanto region, and was able to port the battle system to Pokemon Stadium in a week just by reading the original code for Red and Green.
Of course, we could go on for a long time about all the accomplishments and games he worked on — and the times he stressed out his developers, like when he basically confirmed the latest Smash Bros. at E3 2011 — but neither one of us really have the time. Instead, let’s focus on one final thing, one which I feel will really be his legacy on games.
Around 2004, Satoru Iwata was concerned that the industry was focused so much on the core gamers they had that they weren’t reaching out to the potential gamers they could reach. It was this mindset that was used to develop Nintendo’s now famous “blue ocean” strategy to create experiences that would appeal to the general population rather than a select group. It was this strategy that made Nintendo the biggest success of the seventh console generation, with the Wii topping 100 million units sold and the Nintendo DS selling over 150 million — making it the second best selling console in history behind only the PlayStation 2.
The strategy unfortunately didn’t work out a second time with the 3DS and Wii U, but it seemed to set things in motion for the current climate we have now. Of course, there are games that appeal to the core gamer, and that won’t change. But more people are now included in the industry, both as a gamer and developer. More games are widely available for the general public to try out, whether it’s a traditional game on a console and/or PC or a free-to-start game on a mobile phone (and before you come in saying that this brought in bad developers, go watch AVGN; there have always been bad developers).
Satoru Iwata wasn’t just an amazing talent, he was a visionary. He was a gamer at heart who learned and excelled at the business end of the industry. And even as he lead a multinational company, he could still find time to pitch in on the ground floor if a problem arose. It may be years before we ever see anyone quite like him (you could argue Gabe Newell, but when was the last time he worked on any game).
Thank you, Iwata-san… for everything.
