Satoru Iwata Dies
Posted: Mon Jul 13, 2015 1:16 am
From Financial Times:
"Nintendo said its president, Satoru Iwata, died on July 11, aged 55, from bile duct tumour."
One of the coolest guys in the industry.
According to a site:
Ladies and gentlemen, meet Satoru Iwata, global president of Nintendo, former acting president of HAL Labs. When he was younger, he disassembled the programs for his home computer by writing down the memory dumps by hand. Mind you, this was before printers. Among his achievements as a game programmer, he...
◦ ... ported the battle code of Pokemon Stadium to the Nintendo 64 despite not having any access to crucial documents. And he did it all in a week.
◦ ... programmed EarthBound (from scratch) in its entirety, also with remarkable speed. At the time, the project was very close to being jettisoned due to the unmanageability of the original coding. The coding itself is a huge scripting language, so complex that, theoretically, the text system alone could be used to write an emulator, if altered somewhat.
◦ ... personally compressed Pokemon Gold And Silver, which filled the cartridge despite still being half-finished. That's the reason the setting for Pokémon Red and Blue was included (with only two locations removed) in the games—there was that much space left after he was done.
◦ ... debugged Super Smash Bros. Melee all by his lonesome. It only took him two weeks—which was all the time he had to get it out.
Edit: added link. What an incredible dude.
"Nintendo said its president, Satoru Iwata, died on July 11, aged 55, from bile duct tumour."
One of the coolest guys in the industry.
According to a site:
Ladies and gentlemen, meet Satoru Iwata, global president of Nintendo, former acting president of HAL Labs. When he was younger, he disassembled the programs for his home computer by writing down the memory dumps by hand. Mind you, this was before printers. Among his achievements as a game programmer, he...
◦ ... ported the battle code of Pokemon Stadium to the Nintendo 64 despite not having any access to crucial documents. And he did it all in a week.
◦ ... programmed EarthBound (from scratch) in its entirety, also with remarkable speed. At the time, the project was very close to being jettisoned due to the unmanageability of the original coding. The coding itself is a huge scripting language, so complex that, theoretically, the text system alone could be used to write an emulator, if altered somewhat.
◦ ... personally compressed Pokemon Gold And Silver, which filled the cartridge despite still being half-finished. That's the reason the setting for Pokémon Red and Blue was included (with only two locations removed) in the games—there was that much space left after he was done.
◦ ... debugged Super Smash Bros. Melee all by his lonesome. It only took him two weeks—which was all the time he had to get it out.
Edit: added link. What an incredible dude.
It's strange since I didn't knew him, but as a Nintendo-fan you saw him often in Nintendo Directs, Iwata Asks, etc and he really had done some great achievements. Was cool to know they had a CEO who really knew gaming and coding. Not to mention he stood up for the classic forms of gaming I like, keeping Nintendo from going to far into "freemium"-territory and such. He will be missed for certain.