Satoru Iwata was born on December 6, 1959, in Sapporo Japan, and was the son of Hiroshi Iwata, who served as a prefectural official. As a teenager, Iwata gained leadership skills through things such as being a class president, student council president, and club president. Because of his leadership skills, Hiroshi wanted his son to follow in his footsteps, but Iwata had different plans. From a very young age, Iwata had been interested in video games, and in high school, his dream would start to become a reality. Iwata created his first games in high school. These games that Iwata made in high school were programmed on an HP-65 programmable calculator. Because this was just a calculator, these games were very simple in nature. This didn’t stop Iwata from receiving great joy when he got to show these calculator games to his friends. This was one of the things that Iwata loved about programming, being able to see people’s positive reactions to his creations. After high school in 1978, Iwata decided to attend the Tokyo Institute of Technology and major in computer science. In his first year at university, Iwata bought his first computer, a Commodore PET 2001. Wanting to fully understand the innerworkings of his new computer, Iwata took it apart to look at the components. The Commodore PET 2001 was similar to Nintendo’s first home video game console, the Famicom (NES), in that it contained the same processor. This similarity would come in handy later down the line. Iwata used the PET 2001 to program his first real video games. Because Iwata loved to show off his programs, his dorm room became known as Iwata Arcade.
Iwata didn’t just show off his games in his dorm room but would also often show off his games to the Seibu department store’s computer department. A group of employees who worked in the computer department saw potential in Iwata as a programmer and in 1980 invited him to join their newly founded company, HAL Laboratory Inc. Iwata started working as a part-time programmer for this fledgling video game company because he was still attending university, but in 1982 when he graduated, he started working full-time. This is when tension started growing between Iwata and his father Hiroshi. His father was not very happy with his son’s decision to join a company that was as small as HAL Laboratory and subsequently stopped talking to his son for about a year. Iwata was determined to prove his father wrong and his time at HAL Laboratory was a huge step in his career.
In 1983, one year after Iwata started working at HAL full-time, he became the company’s coordinator of software production. Iwata would use his new job position to create a working relationship with Nintendo and would go on to produce video games for their newly released video game console, the Famicom (Nintendo Family Computer, Nintendo Entertainment System). During this time, He worked on games such as Balloon Fight, NES Open Tournament Golf, Mother (EarthBound), and the Kirby series. Because of the size of NES Open Tournament Golf, Iwata had to create his own data compression method. This eagerness to take on challenging programming tasks gave Iwata huge respect among his fellow programmers. In 1993, Iwata took over as president of HAL laboratory as the small company started to mount huge debt. At this point, bankruptcy looked very likely for HAL. Nintendo’s president at the time, Hiroshi Yamauchi urged HAL to put Iwata in control because he believed in Iwata’s skills as a leader. Yamauchi and Nintendo also gave HAL a loan, but the conditions were that HAL had to pay back all the money in one year's worth of time. Under the new leadership of Iwata, HAL Laboratory was able to pay back all of Nintendo’s loan, in only half a year. One of the next big video games that Iwata got the chance to work on were Pokémon Gold and Silver.
Originally Pokémon Gold and Silver were going to use the same compression algorithm as the 1st Pokémon games, but because of Iwata’s programming skills, he was able to create a new compression algorithm that was slightly faster than the original. According to Tsunekazu Ishihara who was the president of the Pokémon Company, Iwata was instrumental in bringing Pokémon to the western audience. During his time as the president of Hal Laboratory, Iwata stepped up and did some source code analysis for Pokémon Red and Green, which helped with the localization of the game. Other games that Iwata worked on during this time were Pokémon Gold and Silver, Pokémon Stadium, and Super Smash Bros.
In 2000, Iwata joined Nintendo as the head of their corporate planning division and took a seat on the board of directors. During his 1st two years at Nintendo, Iwata wanted to reduce the cost and length of game development while keeping the same great quality Nintendo has been known for. During these two years, Nintendo saw profit increases of 20 and 41 percent. Hiroshi Yamauchi was the president of Nintendo since 1949 and ran the company for 53 years. He transformed them from a playing card company/toy company to a multibillion-dollar global video game conglomerate. In 2002, Yamauchi retired from Nintendo and with his blessing named Iwata as the new CEO and president of Nintendo. In May of 2002, Iwata was officially named the CEO and President of Nintendo. Iwata became the 4th president of Nintendo and was the 1st president of Nintendo that wasn’t a member of the Yamauchi family which had run the company for three generations since its founding in 1889. As president of Nintendo, Iwata was quoted as saying “In order to expand the gaming population, it is taken for granted that we need to offer games to satisfy veteran gamers. At the same time, I believe that we need to make a new proposal so that those who do not play games can say, ‘I can do it’ and ‘I want to touch it.’ (Satoru Iwata, Nintendo). This started Iwata's idea that he wanted to develop hardware and games that could appeal to all players and not just focus on the top-of-the-line graphics.
Nintendo under Iwata’s supervision started focusing more on the games and software rather than super technically impressive hardware. This new focus for Nintendo lead directly to the success of the DS and Wii. Iwata and Nintendo tried to recreate this success with the sequels to the DS and Wii, the 3DS and Wii U. Both the 3DS and the Wii U were less profitable than Iwata thought they would be. Later in 2014, Iwata admitted that he had misread the market, He continued to place a focus on family-oriented games despite their declining popularity. With the declining sales of the Wii U, this became known as the dark age for Nintendo. With the 3DS barely helping Nintendo stay afloat, Iwata was faced with an impossible task. Nintendo wasn’t making enough money and Iwata needed to let some of his employees go. Not wanting to fire any of his employees, Iwata took accountability and cut some of his pay so that he could afford to pay his employees. Iwata, needing financial success, created an idea for a line of interactive figures. These figures would depict Nintendo characters and could take advantage of Near Field Communication (NFC) to directly connect to their games. This idea became the Amiibo line of figures and cards. This became a huge success and started to lead Nintendo out of the dark age.
In 2014, a tumor was discovered in Iwata’s bile duct during a routine exam. The tumor was removed, and later that year Iwata returned to his role as the CEO and president of Nintendo. In 2015, this medical problem resurfaced and on July 11, 2015, Satoru Iwata passed away at the age of 55 from cholangiocarcinoma (bile duct cancer). On July 13, 2015, flags at Nintendo’s headquarters were lowered to half-staff to honor Iwata’s life and legacy.
Satoru Iwata won’t just be remembered as a great leader, but as a great boss, friend, programmer, and overall, an inspirational person. There is one quote that perfectly sums up Iwata’s life and legacy, “On my business card, I am a corporate president. In my mind, I am a game developer. But in my heart, I am a gamer.” (Satoru Iwata, Nintendo).
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