On a cold December day in 1959 (Dec. 6th 1959) was born a boy who through his own ambitions of enjoyment would change a (not yet formed) multibillion dollar industry. While the rest of the world was about to experience free love and civil rights one boy would spend hours making his own number puzzles and inwardly snickering when school yard acquaintances failed to solve his queries.
This young man was Satoru Iwata. I could only imagine how it felt to be in the tiny cramped work room at HAL Laboratories fresh out of university being paid peanuts wiping sweat from an itching heavy brow “Kore wa sūpāmariode wanai, koko de, kono burokku o okimasu. Kore wa rorodesu!” (Put this block here. This is not Super Mario this is LO LO!) It was at HAL Labs that Mr. Iwata had co-founded both APE Inc. (Earthbound) and Creatures Inc. (Pokémon) he had also found a young protégé in Masahiro Sakurai developing the Kirby series.
Satoru San had seemed to be a fiscal powerhouse for the biggest video game company to have ever existed. Rivaled only by the father of Mario and high flying spirit of adventure Shigeru Miyamoto. To nobodies surprise he was selected by then president of Nintendo, Hiroshi Yamauchi to succeed and brought to fruition in May of 2002. There he was the president of a corporation in a market he had loved with euphoric passion for many years. It was a dream that seemed glowingly unachievable in the days of Lo Lo and Kirby but there he sat touching the heavens glimpsing the luck that he had made shouldering his brandished hard work and his honor ridden dedication worn across his face not only as CEO but a game designer that enjoyed playing games.
Satoru Iwata came from essentially an outsourced intern Comadore to become the head honcho of Big N. Flying in right after the launch of the Nintendo GameCube he oversaw a plethora of game changers such as cell shading Zelda, First Person Perspective Metroid, Nintendo’s first Real Time Strategy game Pikmin, and a little to well-known Life Sim called Animal Crossing. In the year 2004 Iwata had successfully perpetrated an idea most thought to be mad -video games with two screens one to simply view the game world and one to touch for heightened functionality. Touch screens in games either it be a mobile phone, tablet or on a PlayStation console is now a universally accepted and expected function. On the shoulders of giants this was not luck from the heavens this was one man’s decision to fiscally overpower his company this was motion control.
Enter the Wii. HD was all the rage with the PS3 doing a smooth 1080p and Xbox 360 at 720p. Mr. Iwata decided to focus on innovation in place of flashiness. The entire world of consumers may not have known what a “Wii mote” or “nunchuck” were, but they knew there was hell to pay if it was not under the Christmas tree in December 2006.
After the overly major success of the Wii President Iwata had decided to skip the middle man of the commerce market and to literally become the face of Nintendo. Hosting many Nintendo Direct online video presentations Satoru Iwata would sweetly with the cool of his breath and with hypnotic spellcasting hand gestures bring Nintendo’s latest endeavors “directly to you” urging their loyal customers to buy new products such as a stereoscopic 3D Nintendo DS (3DS) and an HD console with all the processing power of the current generation equipped with a gyroscopic tablet (WiiU). Iwata was marketing genius and even when the company faced a fiscal issue he would voluntarily take a pay decrease just so the company would not have to make cuts and layoff his valued employees. Most CEOs do not even partake of their own products much less truly enjoy what they do.
Iwata was different he was lucky to be over something he completely loved until cancer took him at age 55 after all luck is in his companies name-sake Nintendo- Leave Luck to the Heavens. It was said that a rainbow appeared over Kyoto Japan on July 14th merely a day after the great leader died. “The Rainbow Road to Heaven” named after his favorite course in the MarioKart franchise.