Satoru Iwata

Satoru Iwata (Japanese: Iwata Satoshi／Iwata Satoru, Romanized: Iwata Satoru, December 6, 1959 – July 11, 2015) was a Japanese businessman, video game programmer and producer. He served as the fourth president of Nintendo since 2002 and served as CEO of Nintendo of America from 2013 until his death in 2015. Iwata's business strategy does not focus on the pursuit of top-notch gaming hardware, but advocates expanding the audience of video games through the development of more novel and interesting games. He has made a significant contribution in this regard. Iwata was born in Sapporo. He showed interest in video games at a young age and created his first simple game in high school. He studied at Tokyo Institute of Technology, majoring in computer science. In 1980, he joined the game developer HAL Research Institute while studying in college. Later, he worked closely with Nintendo as a programmer at HAL and launched his first commercial game in 1983. Later, he participated in the production of "Earthbound 2: Zig's Counterattack" and multiple "Kirby" series games. After experiencing a period of career downturn when the company was on the verge of bankruptcy, in 1993, at the recommendation of Nintendo's then president Hiroshi Yamauchi, Satoru Iwata was promoted to president of HAL and stabilized the company's financial situation after taking office. In the following years, Iwata participated in the development of the "Pokémon" and "Super Smash Bros." series of games. In 2000, Satoru Iwata joined Nintendo as head of the business planning department. After Satoru Iwata joined, Nintendo experienced profit growth. In May 2002, Satoru Iwata took over as president of the company after Hiroshi Yamauchi retired. Under the leadership of Satoru Iwata, Nintendo developed the dual-screen handheld Nintendo DS and the game console Wii, which focuses on somatosensory interaction, making the company a huge commercial success. He bluntly stated that he "has the heart of a gamer" and advocated using blue ocean strategy to broaden the appeal of video games to all ages and different groups of people. In 2009, Nintendo's profits hit a record high, and "Barron's" ranked Satoru Iwata among the top 30 CEOs in the world. Since then, Iwata has further continued to expand his strategy, planning a quality-of-life product line for Wii, and further evolved it into a ten-year long-term strategy aimed at creating independent products. However, the market performance of Nintendo's next-generation hardware 3DS and Wii U after this was far behind.