A Tribute to Satoru Iwata
Satoru Iwata had humble beginnings as an average kid from Sapporo, Japan with not much more than his little family and a small but growing interest in computers. He grew up tinkering, playing and exercising his intuitive nature for technological materials wherever and whenever possible and eventually creating a game of his own while still in high school. Simple as it may have been, his passion for computers grew with every time he beat a game, designed a level or drew up an idea. Iwata was later accepted into the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1978 where he majored computer science among with some friends. Satoru and his friends decided to band together and form a company that created and coded games named HAL Laboratory, the father of many of today’s favourite Nintendo games.
Iwata took a position at Nintendo as the head of its corporate planning division in 2000, he was in charge of ensuring customer satisfaction with prices and quality. When Hiroshi Yamauchi, the company's 3rd president, retired on May 24, 2002, Satoru was placed as the newest president of the company, the first to not be in direct blood relations with the Yamauchi family. Mr. Iwata received many praises and advice from Yamauchi and Nintendo rejoiced at what Satoru Iwata would bring to the company. In the following years, Iwata helped Nintendo’s sales to skyrocket, developing the DS and Wii consoles with an attitude directed towards giving gamers an experience of joy and entertainment rather than searching for profit in a forced consumerism way. Mr. Iwata inspired a new era of games for Nintendo, creativity taking higher importance than money and joy being forged rather than mute addiction. Even in their financial downturn, Nintendo kept releasing family style games despite declining popularity among the audience. But towards the end of 2014, two major games were released helping to pick the sales out of the dust. These two games (ironically enough) were two that Iwata had worked on, put all his effort into producing and they were two games to shed some sunlight onto the situation. Satoru Iwata’s dedication to his work, immense skill level and passion to give the best he can has formed Nintendo into the company it is today. A man of inspiration and creativity, the life of Satoru Iwata was dearly celebrated internationally, when he passed away on June 11th 2015. In memory we share this excerpt from a speech given by Mr. Iwata in at the Game Developers Conference in 2005, “Even if we come from different sides of the world. Speak different languages. Even if we eat too many chips or riceballs. Even if we have different tastes in games. Everyone of us, here today, is identical. In the most important way. Each one of us has the heart of a gamer.” By Adam Elmes |