Leave luck to heaven - An ode to late Nintendo president Satoru Iwata
I woke up this morning to see an incredibly sad flood of messages on social media from the gaming community. Satoru Iwata, the 55-year-old president of Nintendo, passed away on Saturday due to complications from a bile duct growth.
Iwata, who had formerly been an active Nintendo representative at industry trade shows, withdrew from the public eye for a short time in 2014 after suffering a dramatic weight loss that cued many into his health struggles. He later revealed on Twitter that after undergoing bile duct surgery, he was "progressing well", which makes his sudden passing all the more distressing.
A software developer who rose through the ranks to head the world's most famous electronic entertainment company, Iwata originally worked at HAL Laboratory, Inc., a development studio responsible for producing top hits like the Super Smash Bros., Mother and Kirby series. In 2002, he inherited the reins of Nintendo from former president Hiroshi Yamauchi, who had led since 1949, an era when the Japanese software and hardware giant was still making playing cards and plastic toys.
Iwata's time as Nintendo's head was analogous to the late Steve Jobs' role at Apple. He was one of the most popular faces of the "Big N" - perhaps second only to designer Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Mario. I personally became aware of him during the era of the Nintendo Gamecube, a console that birthed some of the most critically acclaimed games of all time (The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Metroid Prime) but sadly played third fiddle to Sony's Playstation 2 and Microsoft's Xbox.
But despite the Gamecube's limited success, it was Iwata's guidance and emphasis on pushing out innovative hardware that steadied Nintendo's ship. The years from 2004 onwards were especially profitable, thanks to the launch of multi-screen devices like the Nintendo DS - the best selling handheld game console to date - and motion-sensing machines like the Wii. Throughout this period, often referenced by fans as the time when Nintendo consoles were "printing money", Iwata maintained a cheery, refreshingly honest demeanour in an industry obsessed with tech speak.
"On my business card, I am a corporate president," he said during a keynote speech at the Game Developers Conference in 2005. "In my mind, I am a game developer. But in my heart, I am a gamer."
Iwata's emphasis on "heart" and being a "gamer" spoke to a legion of fans disillusioned with stereotypical executives content to spout statistics about how many polygons their machines could produce. Even rival companies showed their respect, and one of the most re-tweeted messages this morning came from the account of none other than Sony.
Whoever steps up to carry the legacy that Iwata left behind will have their work cut out for them. Dedicated video game machines have suffered in the last half a decade at the hands of all-in-one smartphones and tablets, and Nintendo's latest console, the Wii U, has met with a mixed reception. In March of this year, Iwata announced that Nintendo was working on its next hardware iteration, and added that after a long period of resistance, the company would finally be developing smartphone software in a partnership with Tokyo mobile gaming studio DeNA.
Whether Nintendo can move forward without Iwata and adapt to changing mainstream tastes remains to be seen. But if the Gamecube era could be weathered, then anything is possible - and besides, Nintendo's name roughly translates into "leave luck to heaven".
Hopefully, Iwata's up there in heaven himself, continuing to cheer for the House of Mario.
