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Satoru Iwata

The programmer who became Nintendo's president

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Satoru Iwata joined the small Tokyo developer HAL Laboratory as a programmer in 1982, wrote early Famicom games including Balloon Fight, became HAL's president and in 2002 succeeded Hiroshi Yamauchi as president of Nintendo. He led it through the DS and the Wii, took the blame and pay cuts for the 3DS and Wii U, and interviewed its developers himself in Iwata Asks. He died in July 2015, aged 55.

When Satoru Iwata gave the keynote at the Game Developers Conference in March 2005, he had been president of Nintendo for nearly three years. He opened with a line that followed him for the rest of his life: “On my business card, I am a corporate president. In my mind, I am a game developer. But in my heart, I am a gamer.” Then he told the room about pulling all-nighters at HAL Laboratory and living on pizza. Iwata had written some of the first games for Nintendo’s Famicom, rebuilt other people’s troubled projects, and kept reading source code long after he was running companies.

Fast facts

  • Born: 6 December 1959. Died: 11 July 2015, of a bile duct growth, aged 55.
  • Education: Tokyo Institute of Technology, from 1978.
  • HAL Laboratory: full-time from 1982, as its fifth full-time employee; president from 1993.
  • Games programmed at HAL: Golf, Pinball, Balloon Fight and F-1 Race for the Famicom.
  • Nintendo: director from June 2000; president from May 2002 until his death; also chief executive of Nintendo of America from June 2013.
  • Iwata Asks: his interviews with Nintendo’s developers, published on its website from 2006.

A calculator, a club and HAL

Iwata’s first computer was a Hewlett-Packard programmable calculator, which he bought with money from part-time work while still a student. He wrote a Star Trek game for it, he told Edge in 2001, because he had read that one existed and wanted one of his own. He entered the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1978. In his GDC keynote he described leaving his classmates to their studies and riding his motorcycle to a Tokyo computer shop, where he fell in with other enthusiasts: “We became friends … formed a club … and soon rented an apartment in the Akihabara district of Tokyo, where we began designing our own games.” That group, he said, “is what became the company known today as HAL”. While at university he also wrote games part-time for the Commodore VIC-20, for friends who worked on the machine in Japan.

When he graduated, in 1982, he joined HAL full-time. “I had the distinction of joining the smallest company of any graduate in my class,” he said. He was its fifth full-time employee: “I was a programmer. And an engineer. And a designer. And I marketed our games.”

Famicom programmer

HAL saw the Famicom as its chance and pushed for a meeting with Nintendo. Nintendo did hire it, Iwata recalled, but not for one of HAL’s own ideas: “they told us to fix one of their projects”, a game that had fallen badly behind schedule. HAL repaired it, and it came out as Pinball. Wireframe credits Iwata with programming Golf, Pinball, Balloon Fight and F-1 Race, and says he fitted a whole 18-hole course into Golf’s few kilobytes.

Balloon Fight shows how far his work spread. Toshihiko Nakago’s team at SRD, which programmed for Nintendo, had made the arcade version, while HAL made the Famicom one, and the Famicom version moved more smoothly. When Nakago asked why, Iwata told him to calculate a character’s position with fractions as well as whole numbers, doubling the precision. Nakago used the idea in Super Mario Bros.: “The reason why Mario moves so smoothly in the underwater stages is thanks to the guidance I was given by you.” Yoshio Sakamoto, who worked on Balloon Fight at Nintendo, told a GDC audience in 2010 that its programmer was “none other than Satoru Iwata”.

President of HAL

By the early 1990s HAL was in trouble. Wireframe describes sales slowing, an expensive failure, and Nintendo stepping in to save the company from bankruptcy. Iwata became its president in 1993. HAL closed its publishing arm and made fewer games.

Two of them were the games he was proudest of. Asked by Edge in 2001 which of his games he liked best, he named “the original Kirby game and Smash Brothers, because I was involved pretty closely and deeply in the development of these two.” Masahiro Sakurai designed Kirby’s Dream Land (1992) at HAL during Iwata’s time. On Super Smash Bros. Iwata worked with the team even as president; at GDC he remembered nights when “we at HAL would see the sun shining on the mountain before we ever went to bed.”

He also helped other people’s games. Shigesato Itoi has recalled that Mother 2, released in the West as EarthBound, was stuck when Iwata came to look at it and said: “If we use what you’ve got now, it’ll take two years to fix. If we start from scratch, we can get this done in six months.” In Itoi’s account, the team rebuilt it in six months and then spent another six polishing it.

In 2010 two Pokémon developers told Iwata what he had done for them. Shigeki Morimoto said Iwata had ported his battle program to the Nintendo 64, for Pokémon Stadium, in about a week. Tsunekazu Ishihara listed reading the whole Game Boy source code, reworking it, deciding how to localise Red and Green, and writing “tools for compressing the Pokémon graphic code”. A popular story says his compression made room for a second region in Pokémon Gold and Silver. A 2023 analysis of the games’ code, reported by Nintendo Life, found that his routine in those games made them faster rather than much smaller.

President of Nintendo

Iwata joined Nintendo’s board in June 2000 and ran its corporate planning division. In May 2002 Hiroshi Yamauchi, who had led the company since 1949, handed the presidency to him. Yamauchi, Iwata said at GDC, “appointed me to succeed him as company president”.

His argument, repeated for years, was that games were growing bigger and more expensive while the audience stayed the same. At GDC in 2005 Edge heard him warn that the range of games on offer was shrinking even as the industry grew. His answer was hardware that did something different. The Nintendo DS, announced in January 2004, puzzled the industry with its two screens. At the Tokyo Game Show in September 2005 he unveiled the one-handed controller of the console codenamed Revolution with no live demonstration at all, just himself holding it. That console became the Wii in 2006. By Nintendo’s figures the DS family sold 154.02 million units and the Wii 101.63 million.

The next machines were harder. After the 3DS sold slowly in 2011, Nintendo cut its price by a third in America and Europe; Edge reported that Iwata “accepted responsibility and took a 50 per cent pay cut”. The Wii U, launched in 2012, sold 13.56 million by Nintendo’s figures, and in January 2014 Iwata halved his pay again. He would not cut staff to improve the results. At the 2013 shareholders’ meeting he said: “If we reduce the number of employees for better short-term financial results, however, employee morale will decrease, and I sincerely doubt employees who fear that they may be laid off will be able to develop software titles that could impress people around the world.”

Iwata Asks

Before the Wii went on sale, Iwata started what he called “a somewhat peculiar experiment”: as company president, he would interview Nintendo’s own developers and publish the conversations. The interviews recorded how the Game & Watch, Super Mario Bros., Pokémon and many other Nintendo products were made, in the words of the people who made them. He also fronted the company’s Nintendo Direct video announcements himself.

Illness and death

Iwata missed E3 in 2014 on health grounds. Nintendo announced on 13 July 2015 that he had died two days earlier of a bile duct growth. He was 55. In 2019 the Japanese publisher Hobonichi, run by Shigesato Itoi, collected his interviews and writings in a book; its English translation, Ask Iwata, came out in 2021.

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