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Satoru Iwata
Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Satoru Iwata

Japanese video game executive (1959–2015)

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 2015.2

From Wikipedia’s article on Satoru Iwata (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.

Born Dec 6, 1959, died Jul 11, 2015.1

About

Iwata was a major contributor in broadening the appeal of video games by focusing on novel and entertaining software 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, coding his first commercial console game in 1983 and programming early Nintendo Entertainment System titles including Pinball, Golf, and Balloon Fight. Later games to which he contributed include EarthBound and numerous installments in the Kirby series. Following a financial downturn and near-bankruptcy, Iwata became the president of HAL in 1993 at the insistence of Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi and restored the company's financial stability. In the following years, he assisted 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 strong growth under Iwata, and when Yamauchi retired in May 2002, Iwata succeeded him as the company's president, becoming the first president unrelated to the Yamauchi family. 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 and the Touch! Generations brand. 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, with the company recording its first operating losses in 30 years during this period. Refusing to lay off employees, Iwata voluntarily halved his salary in 2011 and again in 2014. In 2015, after several years of decline, Iwata directed a portion of Nintendo's focus into the rapidly growing mobile game market through a landmark partnership with mobile provider DeNA established that March, while overseeing early development of the Nintendo Switch. Throughout his tenure, Iwata built a close 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 illness resurfaced in 2015, and Iwata died at the age of 55 from its complications on July 11. Members of the gaming industry and players worldwide offered tributes through public announcements and social media, and fans established temporary memorials around the globe. Iwata was posthumously awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2015 Golden Joystick Awards and the 2016 D.I.C.E. Awards.

From Wikipedia’s article on Satoru Iwata, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.2

Companies

Early life and education

  • Date not recordedHokkaido Sapporo Minami High School3
  • Date not recordedTokyo Institute of Technology3

Satoru Iwata was born on December 6, 1959, and raised in Sapporo, Japan, where his father, Hiroshi Iwata, 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 demonstration computer that used telephone lines. Iwata frequented the Sapporo subway and played a simple numeric game called Game 31 on a pay-per-hour computer until he mastered it. With money saved from a dish-washing job and an additional allowance from his father, Iwata purchased an HP-65, the first magnetic-card 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 simple number and sports games Iwata produced, such as a baseball simulation, Volleyball, and Missile Attack, made use of the programmable calculator he shared with his schoolmates.

Using his graduation gift money, he obtained his first computer, a Commodore PET 2001, in 1978. He dismantled and studied the machine out of a desire to understand its architecture. The computer coincidentally used a central processing unit (the MOS 6502) similar to the Ricoh 2A03 processor later used by Nintendo in the Family Computer (Famicom) and Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), a console for which he would later write software. 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 code faster and more accurately than any of his other students.

While attending the university, he served as one of several unpaid interns at Commodore Japan, assisting the subsidiary's head engineer, Yash Terakura, with hardware and software-development tasks, including the Commodore Color PET prototype and early software such as Car Race and Star Battle. One of his primary reasons for taking the internship was to spend more time around computers and learn technical details not openly available to the public. Terakura served as a mentor to Iwata, teaching him hardware engineering to supplement Iwata's software knowledge. Iwata and several friends rented an apartment in Akihabara and formed a club where they created and coded games. Classmates living in nearby apartments referred to Iwata's room as "Game Center Iwata". He frequently demonstrated his programs in the computer department of the Seibu department store in Ikebukuro, and in 1980 a group of fellow enthusiasts he met there invited him to join their newly formed company, HAL Laboratory, Inc.

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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 software quality. During his first two years at Nintendo, the company saw profit increases of 20 and 41 percent, gains that were partially attributed to his initiatives. When Yamauchi, the company's president since 1949, retired on May 24, 2002, Iwata succeeded him 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 the company's 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 groups as needed, though this structure inhibited efficient collaboration between certain departments.

At the time of Iwata's inauguration as president, Nintendo, while still profitable, was underperforming compared to competing console manufacturers. The GameCube was selling poorly relative to Sony's PlayStation 2 and Microsoft's Xbox. His presidency also coincided with the rise of online console gaming, a market segment Nintendo had largely avoided. He took a measured approach to the issue, stating: "We're not negative toward the idea of going online. We're just practical." He also fostered a partnership between Nintendo and Capcom for exclusive titles intended to bolster the GameCube's appeal. During a 2002 interview, Iwata stated that he felt the video game industry was becoming overly exclusive and complex, and that he wanted to develop hardware and software that appealed to all players rather than chasing cutting-edge 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 sharply with Yamauchi's practice of rarely meeting with staff and delivering a single annual address. Shigeru Miyamoto described the previous corporate atmosphere as "stuffy" and stated that Iwata "improved the ventilation". Aware that his title as president alone would not guarantee buy-in from veteran creators, Iwata sought to communicate with employees on a personal level. If staff members disagreed with his view, Iwata encouraged them to pursue their own concept over his, stating that "creators only improve themselves by taking risks". Alongside increased personal interaction, Iwata introduced greater data analysis and empirical testing into Nintendo's business operations. Whereas Yamauchi made decisions based on intuition and experience, Iwata presented hypotheses backed by market data to build consensus. Iwata also promoted Miyamoto, Genyo Takeda, Yoshihiro Mori, and Shinji Hatano to representative directors on the company's board of directors, matching his own representative standing.

From Wikipedia’s article on Satoru Iwata (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.

Career

Occupation: video game producer, entrepreneur, computer scientist, game programmer, programmer, engineer, executive producer.8

Known for: Ask Iwata: Words of Wisdom from Nintendo's Legendary CEO.9

Personal life

  • BornDec 6, 1959, Sapporo10
  • DiedJul 11, 2015, Kyoto11
  • CitizenshipJapan12

Sources

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