page_title: Satoru Iwata
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Satoru Iwata / Early life
caption_attribution_description: Commodore PET 2001 computer. On display at the Musée Bolo, EPFL, Lausanne. The making of this document was supported by Wikimedia CH. (Submit your project!) For all the files concerned, please see the category Supported by Wikimedia CH. العربية&#160;| বাংলা&#160;| čeština&#160;| Deutsch&#160;| English&#160;| Esperanto&#160;| español&#160;| français&#160;| magyar&#160;| italiano&#160;| македонски&#160;| Nederlands&#160;| rumantsch&#160;| sicilianu&#160;| українська&#160;| +/−
context_page_description: Satoru Iwata was a Japanese businessman, video game programmer, video game designer and producer. He was the fourth president and chief executive officer of Nintendo. He was a major contributor in broadening the appeal of video games by focusing on novel and entertaining games rather than top-of-the-line hardware.
  Born in Sapporo, Japan, 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, producing his first commercial game in 1983. Games to which he contributed include EarthBound and the Kirby series. Following a downturn and near-bankruptcy, Iwata became the president of HAL in 1993 at the insistence of Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi and brought financial stability. In the following years, he worked in the development of the Pokémon and Super Smash Bros. series. Iwata joined Nintendo as the head of its corporate planning division in 2000.
context_section_description: Satoru Iwata was born on December 6, 1959, and raised in Sapporo, Japan, where his father 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 demo computer that used telephone lines. Iwata would frequent the Sapporo subway and play a simple numeric game, called Game 31, until he mastered it. With money saved up from a dish-washing job and some additional allowance from his father, Iwata purchased an HP-65, the first 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 several simple number games Iwata produced, such as Volleyball and Missile Attack, made use of an electronic calculator he shared with his schoolmates.
  He obtained his first computer, a Commodore PET, in 1978. He dismantled and studied the machine out of his desire to understand it. The computer coincidentally had a central processing unit (MOS 6502) similar to the one used by Nintendo for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), a gaming console for which he would later develop games. 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 programs faster and more accurately than any of his other students.
  While attending the school, he was one of several unpaid interns at Commodore Japan, assisting the subsidiary's head engineer—Yash Terakura—with technical and software-development tasks. One of his main reasons for taking the job was to spend more time around computers and learn of details not openly available to the public. Terakura would later serve as a mentor to Iwata, teaching him about hardware engineering to supplement Iwata's already extensive software knowledge. Iwata and several of his friends rented an apartment in Akihabara and soon formed a club where they would create and code games. Classmates living in nearby apartments referred to Iwata's room as "Game Center Iwata". He would frequently show off his games to the Seibu department store's computer department, and by 1980 a group of employees there invited him to join their company, HAL Laboratory, Inc.
caption: A Commodore PET 2001, the same model series Iwata purchased in 1978 and subsequently dismantled
exif: {"Image Make": "Canon", "Image Model": "Canon EOS 5D Mark II", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image DateTime": "2011:10:26 11:46:32", "Image Artist": "", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "Image Copyright": "", "Image ExifOffset": "222", "GPS GPSVersionID": "[2, 2, 0, 0]", "Image GPSInfo": "8004", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "8116", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "5047", "EXIF ExposureTime": "16/5", "EXIF FNumber": "20", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Aperture Priority", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "200", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2011:10:25 17:18:05", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2011:10:25 17:18:05", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF ShutterSpeedValue": "-27/16", "EXIF ApertureValue": "69/8", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "-2/3", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Spot", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, compulsory flash mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "100", "EXIF SubSecTime": "33", "EXIF SubSecTimeOriginal": "33", "EXIF SubSecTimeDigitized": "33", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "5000", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "5000", "Interoperability InteroperabilityIndex": "R98", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "7974", "EXIF FocalPlaneXResolution": "5616000/1459", "EXIF FocalPlaneYResolution": "1872000/479", "EXIF FocalPlaneResolutionUnit": "2", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard"}