Programmer, President of HAL Laboratory and Nintendo · HAL Laboratory, Nintendo · b. 1959 · 1980–2015
A programmer who rescued HAL Laboratory from near-bankruptcy, then led Nintendo through the DS and Wii — and who described himself as a corporate president on his business card but a gamer in his heart.
Satoru Iwata was born in Sapporo on 6 December 1959. While studying computer science at the Tokyo Institute of Technology he began working part-time as a programmer at HAL Laboratory in 1980, and he joined full-time in 1982. He became one of the most respected programmers of the Famicom era, contributing to Balloon Fight, the Kirby series and EarthBound, whose troubled development he helped bring to completion. Later he wrote compression tools that helped fit Pokémon Gold and Silver onto their cartridge, and ported Pokémon Stadium's battle system in a week. In 1993, with HAL near bankruptcy, Iwata became its president, and over the following six years he stabilised the company's finances. He joined Nintendo in 2000 as head of corporate planning and in May 2002 became its fourth president — the first not related to the Yamauchi family. As president, Iwata pursued what was described as a "blue ocean" strategy: rather than competing purely on hardware power, Nintendo set out to attract people who did not play games. The Nintendo DS and Wii were the results, and both became enormous commercial successes. Iwata also became Nintendo's public face, launching the developer interview series Iwata Asks in 2006 and the Nintendo Direct presentations in 2011. He died on 11 July 2015, aged 55, from complications of a bile duct tumour.