Satoru Iwata

was a Japanese businessman, video game programmer and gamer. He was the fourth president and CEO of Nintendo. He is widely regarded as someone who helped make video games liked by a wider audience by focusing on making entertaining games rather than advanced hardware.

On July 11, 2015, Iwata died of bile duct cancer at age 55. Iwata was posthumously awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2015 Golden Joystick Awards and the 2016 DICE Awards.

## Early life
Iwata was born and raised in Sapporo, Japan on December 6, 1959. His father was a municipal mayor.

Iwata got his first computer, a Commodore PET, in 1978. He took the machine apart, and he studied the machine because he wanted to understand it. The computer had a central processing unit (MOS 6502) similar to the one used by Nintendo for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). The NES was a gaming console for which he would later make games.

Iwata expressed interest in the creation of video games early on and during his high school years, began producing electronic games at his home. The several simple number games Iwata produced made use of an electronic calculator he shared with his schoolmates. Following high school, Iwata was admitted to the Tokyo Institute of Technology, where he majored in computer science. Tomohiko Uematsu, an engineering professor, said Iwata was very good at software programming. He said that Iwata could write programs faster and better than any of his other students. While attending the school, he did an unpaid internship at Commodore Japan. There, he helped the head engineer—Yash Terakura Classmates living in nearby apartments called Iwata's room "Game Center Iwata".

## HAL Laboratory
While attending the school, he worked part-time as a programmer for HAL Laboratory, Inc. He joined the company full-time after graduating in 1982. Iwata was its fifth employee and only programmer. Around the same time, Iwata's father was elected mayor of Muroran. Iwata's family did not agree with Iwata's career choice. His father did not talk to him for six months after Iwata joined HAL. Nintendo contacted other developers to make *Open Tournament Golf*; however, all of them did not want to as they did not believe the large amount of data could be kept in an NES cartridge. Iwata said he could develop the game. It was very difficult for Iwata; he had to create his own data compression method in order to fit all 18&nbsp;golf courses into the game. HHAL had to make parallax scrolling for *F-1 Race* because the NES hardware did not support it.

Although he was not part of Nintendo at the time, Iwata helped with developing *Pokémon Gold* and *Silver* by creating compression tools used for graphics in the games. While working as a go-between for Game Freak and Nintendo, he helped program *Pokémon Stadium* for the Nintendo 64. All he had to do was read the original coding in *Pokémon Red* and *Green* and porting the battle system into the new game in just one week. He also helped Masahiro Sakurai develop *Super Smash Bros.* for the Nintendo 64. During his first two years at Nintendo, the company saw profit increase 20 and 41&nbsp;percent. Iwata's work helped do this. Iwata became Nintendo's fourth president. He was the first Nintendo president that was not in the Yamauchi family through blood or marriage. Yamauchi asked Iwata for one things: "that Nintendo have new ideas and create hardware that shows that ideal. And make software that has the same standard." He also created a relationship between Nintendo and Capcom that helped the GameCube.

### Revitalization of the company (2003–09)
Following up on his 2002&nbsp;interview, Iwata created a "blue ocean" strategy to help Nintendo compete against the other console makers. Instead of competing against them about powerful hardware, Iwata decided to make interesting and entertaining hardware and games.

## Death
On July 11, 2015, Iwata died of bile duct cancer at age 55.

## Notes
## References
## Other websites
* Satoru Iwata  at Nintendo Miiverse
* Seattle Post Intelligence: Satoru Iwata Interview 
* Satoru Iwata Kikizo Video Interview
* Gamespy: ''Nintendo's New Direction'' - A discussion with Nintendo President Satoru Iwata
* Heart of a Gamer speech at GDC '05 
* A+E Interactive E3 2007 Interview
* Level Up E3 2007 Interview