Nintendo President Satoru Iwata Dead at 55
Satoru Iwata, president of Nintendo for 13 years, died yesterday. The news was released to the public a short while ago. Iwata joined Nintendo in the 1980s through HAL Laboratory, where the roster of games he worked on ran the gamut from Balloon Fight to EarthBound. He became the company’s director in 2000, and two short years later, Nintendo’s long-standing and notoriously sinister president Hiroshi Yamauchi retired and appointed Iwata as his successor.
In contrast to Yamauchi, Iwata maintained a public presence, revealing the workings behind the traditionally closed-off Nintendo production process through a years-long series of roundtables on the Nintendo website called “Iwata Asks.” In later years, public appearances would prove difficult for him, though he managed to appear one last time as a puppet for an E3 digital event.
The state of Iwata’s health was never put in the spotlight, though it did make the news when he skipped E3 2014 due to reportedly poor health. Iwata had apparently been battling a bile duct growth for quite some time, ultimately having to undergo surgery to get it removed. He tweeted a few months ago that his health was improving, but later the growth came back, and Iwata has passed away.
Mr. Iwata-san will be greatly missed by Nintendo fans and the video game community at large. He was 55 years old.