Satoru Iwata, who as president and chief executive of Nintendo oversaw the introduction of gaming systems such as the Nintendo DS and the Wii, died on Saturday, the company said in a statement.
The statement said the cause was a bile duct growth. He was 55.
A former video game development leader, Iwata was appointed president of Nintendo in May 2002 and became chief executive of Nintendo of the US in June 2013, the company said.
Photo: Bloomberg
He was the first chief executive to come from outside the Yamauchi family, which founded the company in 1889 as a manufacturer of playing cards and ran it until Iwata was hired.
At the start of Iwata’s tenure, Nintendo, long a leader in home gaming systems, was fending off fierce competition by rivals like Sony and Microsoft. Under his watch, the company surged ahead with the release of the Nintendo DS, a hand-held gaming system, the popular Wii home gaming console, and Amiibo, a line of interactive toys.
However, the company struggled to adapt to a changing video game business and resisted the industry trend to develop games for smartphones and tablets, preferring to stick to a more traditional approach of designing games to be played on their own hardware.
It did reverse course in March, but Iwata said then that the company remained committed to producing its own game platforms. It had planned to share more details about a new system, code-named NX, next year.
“For us to create unique experiences that other companies cannot, the best possible option for us is to be able to develop hardware that can realize unique software experiences,” Iwata told Time magazine in March.
As a former developer, Iwata displayed a fluency in the language of gaming and an ease with young developers that was a change from his predecessor, Hiroshi Yamauchi, who led Nintendo for 53 years while professing not to understand video games. Iwata believed that video games should be engaging for everyone and it was that principle that animated his career.
One of Iwata’s early accomplishments was to oversee the production of Kirby’s Dream Land for Gameboy. The game, which features a puffy, pink protagonist who gobbles up enemies and spits them out as projectiles, became a hallmark of casual gameplay for the mobile game device well before the era of smartphone games.
Similarly, simplicity and ease of use were the driving forces behind the motion sensor technology that made the Wii console so popular.
Known for pushing back against complicated and expensive video games, Iwata quipped at a 2006 conference that had Tetris been introduced then, it would have required better graphics and a film deal to be feasible.
During the same speech, Iwata gave a sort of coda on his views on gaming: “Video games are meant to be just one thing: Fun. Fun for everyone.”
A series of interviews about the development of Nintendo products that Iwata conducted with the company’s employees revealed an easy, amiable camaraderie and were peppered with jokes and playful teasing. It was published to the Nintendo Web site under the title “Iwata Asks.”
“Since I myself come from a development background, I think I understand the minds of developers better than most executives,” Iwata said during one exchange, when asked about his relationship with employees. “I think the fact that I have been centrally involved in the creation of Wii is the biggest factor in explaining why my staff and I understand each other so well.”
Iwata was born on Dec. 6, 1959. He was a much-admired figure throughout the games business and tributes to him poured onto social media on Sunday as word of his death began to spread.
Electronic Arts chief operating officer Peter Moore said on Twitter: “What a terribly sad day. Iwata-San was such a gentleman. Huge loss for the industry.”
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