Iwata

Satoru Iwata (Japanese: 岩田 聡; December 6, 1959 – July 11, 2015) was a Japanese businessman, video game programmer and producer. Beginning in 2002, Iwata served as the fourth president of Nintendo, as well as the chief executive officer (CEO) of Nintendo of America from 2013 until his death in 2015. Iwata was a major contributor in broadening the appeal of video games by focusing on novel and en...

Satoru Iwata (Japanese: 岩田 聡; December 6, 1959 – July 11, 2015) was a Japanese businessman, video game programmer and producer. Beginning in 2002, Iwata served as the fourth president of Nintendo, as well as the chief executive officer (CEO) of Nintendo of America from 2013 until his death in 2015. Iwata was a major contributor in broadening the appeal of video games by focusing on novel and entertaining games rather than top-of-the-line hardware. Born in Sapporo, Iwata expressed interest in video games from an early age and created his first simple game while in high school. He majored in computer science at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. In 1980, he joined the game developer HAL Laboratory while attending the university. At HAL, he worked as a programmer and closely collaborated with Nintendo, producing his first commercial game in 1983. Games to which he contributed include EarthBound and many games in the Kirby series. Following a downturn and near-bankruptcy, Iwata became the president of HAL in 1993 at the insistence of Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi and brought financial stability. In the following years, he worked in the development of the Pokémon and Super Smash Bros. series. Iwata joined Nintendo as the head of its corporate planning division in 2000. Nintendo saw growth under Iwata and, when Yamauchi retired, he was sworn in as the company's president in May 2002. Under Iwata's leadership, Nintendo developed the Nintendo DS and Wii game consoles, helping the company achieve massive financial success. As a self-declared gamer, he focused on expanding the appeal of video games across demographics through a "blue ocean" business strategy. Nintendo attained record profits by 2009, and Barron's placed Iwata among the top 30 CEOs worldwide. Iwata expanded his strategy by defining a quality-of-life product line for the Wii that evolved into a ten-year strategy to create standalone products. Later hardware such as the Nintendo 3DS and Wii U proved far less profitable than the Wii, and Nintendo's net sales fell by two thirds from 2009 to 2012; the company saw its first operating losses in 30 years during this time. Iwata voluntarily halved his salary in 2011 and again in 2014. In 2015, after several years of decline, Iwata put a portion of Nintendo's focus into the rapidly growing mobile game market; a landmark partnership with mobile provider DeNA was established that March. Throughout his career, Iwata built a relationship with Nintendo fans through social media and his regular appearances in Iwata Asks and Nintendo Direct, becoming the public face of the company. In June 2014, a tumor in Iwata's bile duct was discovered during a routine physical exam. It was removed, and Iwata returned to work in October of that year. The problem resurfaced in 2015, and Iwata died at the age of 55 from its complications on July 11. Members of the gaming industry and gamers worldwide alike offered tributes through public announcements and social media, and fans worldwide established temporary memorials. Iwata was posthumously awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2015 Golden Joystick Awards and the 2016 D.I.C.E. Awards. Early life Satoru Iwata was born on December 6, 1959, and raised in Sapporo, Japan, where his father served as a prefectural official. Throughout middle and high school, Iwata displayed leadership skills through service as class president, student council president, and club president at various times. His first experience with computers was in middle school with a demo computer that used telephone lines. Iwata would frequent the Sapporo subway and play a simple numeric game, called Game 31, until he mastered it. With money saved up from a dish-washing job and some additional allowance from his father, Iwata purchased an HP-65, the first programmable calculator, in 1974. After entering Hokkaido Sapporo South High School in April 1975, he began developing his own games during his junior year. The several simple number games Iwata produced, such as Volleyball and Missile Attack, made use of an electronic calculator he shared with his schoolmates. He obtained his first computer, a Commodore PET, in 1978. He dismantled and studied the machine out of his desire to understand it. The computer coincidentally had a central processing unit (MOS 6502) similar to the one used by Nintendo for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), a gaming console for which he would later develop games. Following high school, Iwata was admitted to the Tokyo Institute of Technology in April 1978, where he majored in computer science. Tomohiko Uematsu, an engineering professor, noted Iwata's proficiency with software programming and remarked that Iwata could write programs faster and more accurately than any of his other students. While attending the school, he was one of several unpaid interns at Commodore Japan, assisting the subsidiary's head engineer—Yash Terakura—with technical and software-development tasks. One of his main reasons for taking the job was to spend more time around computers and learn of details not openly available to the public. Terakura would later serve as a mentor to Iwata, teaching him about hardware engineering to supplement Iwata's already extensive software knowledge. Iwata and several of his friends rented an apartment in Akihabara and soon formed a club where they would create and code games. Classmates living in nearby apartments referred to Iwata's room as "Game Center Iwata". He would frequently show off his games to the Seibu department store's computer department, and by 1980 a group of employees there invited him to join their company, HAL Laboratory, Inc. HAL Laboratory While attending university, Iwata worked for HAL Laboratory as a part-time programmer in 1980. Among their first creations was a peripheral device that enabled older computers to display graphics for video games. With this device, Iwata and members of HAL created multiple games that were "straight rip-offs of Namco's Rally-X, Galaxian, and others". HAL became the first company to establish a license with Namco for developing games. He joined the company in a full-time capacity after graduating in 1982, becoming its fifth employee and only programmer. Around the same time, Iwata's father was elected mayor of Muroran. Despite his passion, Iwata's family did not approve of his career choice, and his father did not talk with him for six months after Iwata joined HAL. Iwata became the company's coordinator of software production in 1983, the time during which he helped HAL create a relationship with Nintendo so they would be able to produce games for its newly released Nintendo Entertainment System. He traveled to Kyoto himself to request permission to work on games for the NES, to which Nintendo obliged. His first commercially published game was Joust for the NES—a port of the 1982 arcade game. Other video games he worked on were Balloon Fight, NES Open Tournament Golf, EarthBound, and the Kirby games. Nintendo initially contacted several other developers to produce Open Tournament Golf; however, all of them declined as they did not believe the large amount of data could be stored within an NES cartridge. Iwata seized this opportunity and "recklessly" stepped up to develop the game. It proved particularly taxing as Iwata had to create his own data compression method in order to fit all 18 courses into the game. Similarly, HAL had to program parallax scrolling for F-1 Race as the NES hardware did not initially support it. Iwata's proficiency with programming quickly placed him in high esteem among fellow programmers and gamers alike. He would often continue to work on weekends and holidays because of his passion. With the company on the verge of bankruptcy, Iwata was promoted to president of HAL in 1993 at the insistence of Nintendo's then-President, Hiroshi Yamauchi. With assistance from Nintendo, Iwata helped turn the company around from its ¥1.5 billion debt and stabilize its finances within six years. Lacking experience in management, Iwata put a lot of effort into learning how to better himself, often reading books on the topic and seeking advice from others. Although he was not part of Nintendo at the time, Iwata assisted in the development of Pokémon Gold and Silver, which were released for the Game Boy Color in November 1999, by creating a set of compression tools utilized for graphics in the games. While working as a go-between for Game Freak and Nintendo, he aided in the programming of Pokémon Stadium for the Nintendo 64 by reading the original coding in Pokémon Red and Green and porting the battle system into the new game in just one week. According to Tsunekazu Ishihara, the president of The Pokémon Company, Iwata was instrumental in bringing Pokémon to Western markets. While being president of HAL, he developed the plan for localization after reviewing the code for Red and Green, which was then completed by Teruki Murakawa, with Western releases coming two years after their Japanese release. Additionally, he assisted Masahiro Sakurai in the development of Super Smash Bros. for the Nintendo 64. Nintendo Early years (2000–2002) In 2000, Iwata joined Nintendo as the head of its corporate planning division and took a seat on the board of directors. Over the next two years, he sought to reduce the cost and length of game development while preserving quality. During his first two years at Nintendo, the company saw profit increases of 20 and 41 percent, values which were at least partially attributable to his work. When Yamauchi, the company's president since 1949, retired on May 24, 2002, Iwata succeeded as Nintendo's fourth president with Yamauchi's blessing. He was the first Nintendo president unrelated to the Yamauchi family through blood or marriage since its founding in 1889. Yamauchi left the company in Iwata's hands with a final request: "that Nintendo give birth to wholly new ideas and create hardware which reflects that ideal. And make software that adheres to that same standard." Iwata inherited a company that promoted individualism, with a policy established by Yamauchi to create new development positions as needed. However, this inhibited efficient collaboration between certain departments. At the time of Iwata's inauguration as president and CEO of the company, Nintendo, though still a profitable company, was not performing as well as other console makers. The recently released GameCube was performing poorly compared to competitors, with Sony's PlayStation 2 and Microsoft's Xbox outselling it. His presidency also came at the onset of the popularization of online gaming, and Nintendo had yet to move into this facet of the market. He took a cautious approach to the issue, stating: "We're not negative toward the idea of going online. We're just practical." He also fostered a relationship between Nintendo and Capcom that improved the GameCube's appeal. During an interview in 2002, Iwata stated that he felt the gaming industry was becoming too exclusive, and he wanted to develop hardware and games that would appeal to all players rather than focusing on top of the line graphics. One of his first actions as president was to meet directly with the company's 40 department heads and 150 other employees. This contrasted starkly with Yamauchi's practice of rarely meeting with employees and generally having a single, annual speech. Shigeru Miyamoto described the previous business atmosphere as "stuffy" and stated Iwata "improved the ventilation". Iwata was acutely aware that his position as president would not ensure compliance from his employees and sought to communicate with them on a personal level. If employees disagreed with his view, Iwata would suggest they follow their idea instead of his own, stating "creators only improve themselves by taking risks". Alongside the increased level of interaction, Iwata also brought more data and science into the business