Nintendo's President Satoru Iwata died

    Such a huge loss for the gaming industry. Not only was he involved with all major Nintendo titles in the 80's, he was also, partly, responsible for Nintendo's biggest successes. Namely the Wii, DS, Pokemon and Super Smash Brothers. What a shame to lose him to cancer on such an young age (55).

    Yeah, seems like he had a lot of health related issues the last couple of years and didn't attend E3, but I had no idea that it was this bad. Sad :(

    This is seriously some of the saddest shit I've heard in ages. He was a great force in gaming, and it sounds like he ran his company in a way that was really awesome for its developers — quite contrary to what I've heard about a lot of Japanese organisations — as well as got stuck in himself wherever he could. He understood his company and its heritage down to the roots and that's so nice to see in a modern gaming giant. And then he died so young.

    Saw this quote on another forum earlier:

    Quote

    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.

    Was very sad to wake up to this today. Don't really follow Nintendo that much these days but I have only ever heard good things about Satoru Iwata. He seemed like a genuinely nice guy.

    I can only hope I achieve half of what he did when I'm 55!

    RIP, he died way too young, fucking cancer man, how much longer is it going to be until we find a cure? :(

    http://shmuplations.com/1994game4/

    Didn't read this interview before, good one.

    "The job of a programmer is to produce good work, meaning that the planners and designers shouldn’t feel the limitations of the hardware. I tell my programmers to think carefully before they say something “can’t be done.” There isn’t that much that can’t be done with a little ingenuity."

    DOMO ARIGATO GOZAIMASHITA!

    R.I.P Satoru Iwata

    :(

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