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Satoru Iwata, who has passed away at the age of 55, was once seen unboxing a Wii U in a Nintendo Direct sporting white surgical gloves: the perfect accompaniment to a man who was gentle, self-deprecating, polite and precise. Behind the scenes, however, he was also a man who was never afraid to get his hands dirty. There's a wonderful story about him patrolling the shop floor at Nintendo's Kyoto headquarters prior to the Wii U's release, being shown the line-up for the console's impending launch in his role as the company's president. He paused on Balloon Trip Breeze, a mini-game within Nintendo Land which paid tribute to Balloon Fight, the 1984 game on which Iwata acted as programmer. Noticing something wasn't quite right with the feel of the characters as they flapped their way across the screen, he astonished everyone present as he set about fixing it - the head of the company rolling his sleeves up and getting stuck into the code. Iwata's tenure, and the affection and respect in which he is held by developers and players alike, has been defined by this hands-on approach. Speaking to Shigesato Itoi, with whom he worked to create the SNES role-playing game Earthbound, Iwata once said he never wanted to be a mere bystander. He never was.
Born during the winter of 1959 in Sapporo, the largest city on Japan's northernmost island Hokkaido, Iwata took an early interest in electronic hardware and games, and was enduringly fascinated by the point at which the two meet. Having his first experience with games via Pong, Iwata bought an early Hewlett Packard pocket calculator and soon put it to novel use. "I think I was one of the original early adopters," he said during his 2005 GDC keynote. "But whereas some used them for mathematics, I used mine to create video games." His first game was an approximation of baseball, played out on the calculator's crude display through numbers alone. His school friends loved it.
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