With the passing of Nintendo president Satoru Iwata, the video game industry has lost one of its most bold and inspiring luminaries. To honour Nintendo's fourth CEO, GameSpot has put together a short gallery chronicling Iwata's career, starting from aspiring developer to iconic president. Images for this gallery were found on the official GDC Flickr (http://bit.ly/1O0S20D)
Satoru Iwata was born on December 6, 1959 and raised in Sapporo, the capital city of Hokkaido, the largest and northernmost of Japan's 47 prefectures. Iwata’s love of gaming began at a very early age, as did his ambition to develop them. According to Iwata, the first game he ever played was Pong, which he “loved.” This spurred him to buy a Hewlitt Packard Pocket Calculator, which he used to program a baseball video game.
Iwata joined the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1978 and enrolled to study engineering and computer science. At the time, game programming was not commonly taught. Despite being unable to study game programming, Iwata’s innate desire to create games pushed him to independently seek out avenues through which he could realise his dream. Instead of studying, he travelled to a Tokyo department store--the first in the city dedicated to PCs--and met like-minded people with dreams of game design and development.
With the friends he made hanging out at the PC retailer, Iwata moved into an apartment in Akihabara, where he spent nights designing and programming games. The group would eventually form a company called HAL. Though Iwata didn’t know it at the time, this studio would deliver some of Nintendo’s most cherished video games including Mother, Kirby, Smash Bros., and more. HAL was named after the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Following the completion of his studies, Iwata became the fifth full-time employee of HAL. By his own account, he joined “the smallest company of any graduate in [his] class.” At HAL, he was a programmer, an engineer, designer, and also marketed the team’s games, “ordered food, and helped clean up.”
The small team at HAL eventually began hearing whispers about a project at Nintendo which involved the development of a machine “capable of incredible new graphics.” Convinced the hardware would be the platform for HAL’s breakout success, the team arranged a meeting with Nintendo. Its first task, however, was a rescue mission. Iwata and his colleagues were put to work with helping bring a game that had fallen behind schedule to completion. That game would eventually be released as NES Pinball.
HAL’s consistency earned it a close relationship with Nintendo and, over time, it was given the opportunity to develop franchises that would go on to become Nintendo icons, such as Kirby. However, its early days were spent doing work-for-hire arcade ports. In between it released numerous entries in the Eggerman series (known in the West as the Adventures of Lolo). As well as this, members of the HAL team took on consultancy work to keep the company afloat.
HAL would go on to work with Shigesato Itoi, a renowned Japanese writer, on his first game: Mother. The role-playing game would eventually be released in the West as Earthbound and, thanks to its unique visual style and mature themes, amassed a passionate cult following.
In 2000, Iwata became head of Nintendo’s corporate planning division. Two years later, Hiroshi Yamauchi, who had served as company president since 1949, retired and Iwata succeeded him as the fourth Nintendo president. He was the first Nintendo president who not part of the Yamauchi family through blood or marriage since it was established in 1889 as a Hanafuda card company.
Iwata’s appointment as the head of Nintendo came in the heat of a crisis. At the time, the Nintendo GameCube’s performance was being eclipsed by its main competitor, the PlayStation 2, and faced stiff competition from Microsoft’s first ever console, the Xbox. It was around then that Iwata began to think about distinguishing Nintendo’s consoles from its rivals, and also appealing to a wider audience by creating approachable, creative experiences.
Iwata’s vision for a successful new Nintendo was defined by “lateral thinking with seasoned technology,” a principle developed by Gunpei Yokoi, father of the Game Boy, Game & Watch, the modern day directional pad, and creator of iconic franchises such as Metroid. It posited that a creative person could take mature technology and find radical new ways of using it to create transformative experiences. The first fruit of this ideology was the Nintendo DS which, in the face of adversity from Sony’s slicker, more powerful PSP, went on to sell over 150 million units, making it the second-best selling console of all time.
At E3 2005 Satoru Iwata took the stage and proudly held a diminutive black box aloft, proclaiming it a gaming revolution. That same year, at Tokyo Game Show, Iwata reiterated the company’s ambition to expand the gaming audience and speak to a wider market and revealed a new controller that “attracts those who aren’t playing games and offers new sensations to veteran” would be the key. The Wii outsold the competition from Sony and Microsoft by a considerable margin and became a bona fide sensation. Importantly, it achieved Iwata’s ambition of placing video games firmly in the mainstream eye and attracting a wider audience. At the height of its popularity, Nintendo’s stock became the second most valuable in Japan.
Iwata’s most recent years were spent trying to maintain the momentum achieved by the Nintendo DS and Wii. Given the magnitude of the success, many would argue this was an impossible task. The follow-ups to both of those devices, the Nintendo 3DS and the Wii U, marked a downturn in the company’s performance. At the heart of these missteps was marketing that failed to distinguish new hardware from old, and a slowness to properly capitalise on the move towards mobile and tablet gaming. Despite this, Iwata remained a shining beacon of Nintendo’s ambition and an unwavering leader, famously refusing to lay off staff.
Last week, Amazon from Walmart.com CEO Fernando Madeira. "But the idea of asking customers to pay extra in order to save money just doesn't add up for us."
"We're standing up for our customers and everyone else who sees no rhyme or reason for paying a premium to save."
Walmart will roll out special deals "with no hidden costs or admission fees" this coming week. And unlike Amazon's Prime Day, which will be held for one day only on July 15 to mark the retailer's 20th anniversary, Walmart's sale period will run for multiple days.
"Our customers will see thousands of great deals on Rollback beginning this week along with some special atomic deals (more on that in the days to come)," Maderia said. "In addition, we're rolling back our free shipping minimum order to $35 from $50."
Walmart did not say what items will be discounted, but you can pretty safely assume video games will be on sale.
The Tony Hawk series of skateboarding games helped introduce the extreme sports to the masses, but the legendary skateboarder himself and namesake for the franchise didn't originally set out to do that. The franchise's mainstream appeal was a "happy accident," Hawk told GameSpot in a recent interview.
Jade Raymond, the co-creator of Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed franchise, has founded a new EA studio called Motive, and will be working on the Visceral's in-development Star Wars title.
Microsoft's Halo series, one of the company's crown jewels, has reached a new sales milestone. The sci-fi shooter series, which debuted in 2001 on Xbox with.
Konami on Monday announced its plans for Europe's big gaming convention, Gamescom, confirming that it will bring , instead choosing to make announcements at Paris Games Week in October.
Microsoft has released the first trailer for Halo: The Fall of Reach, an upcoming animated series that explores the origins of Master Chief and Blue Team. Watching the series should help players better understand the story of .
The games industry has offered its tributes in the wake of the shock news that Nintendo president in order to have surgery to remove a previous bile duct growth.
In the hours following Nintendo's announcement of its CEO's death, fans and peers have paid tribute to one of the industry's most respected and adored figures.
Satoru Iwata, president of Nintendo, passed away on Saturday due to ongoing health complications. He was 55 years old.
column, in which he would interview key members of various upcoming games, Iwata was also the face of the company's Nintendo Direct events. These streams, while primarily designed to make game announcements and provide updates on ongoing projects, became something more thanks to weird and wonderful skits, many of which Iwata would participate in.
"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."
DICE's upcoming --she'll be less an "empty vessel" for players to control and more fleshed out, due to a richer narrative and supporting world.
"We are doing something that is new; it's different and separate from the first game," Ermgard explained. "You will recognize maybe the names of some characters, but they will be different characters in this one. Sometimes we even have the name and the look, but the character, what they do is still different, so there are some carry-overs in terms of ideas.
"I think what we [at DICE] felt was that we wanted a more fleshed out world, a larger world that was more detailed and textured than the original game had," he continued. "Also, we had new art direction--it had been eight years since the first game, so I think a lot of people felt that it was time to take the elements that we felt worked with the first game, and then use them to then expand upon that to do this game. People shouldn't expect to understand any sort of connection to the first game. This is its own thing."
As for the new version of Faith, Ermgard said the original game focused on providing a character players could fully imprint upon, stepping into her shoes and allowing them to experience the world as they wanted. For Catalyst, however, Ermgard said DICE was keen on creating a deeper narrative, which in turn led them scrapping the "blank canvas" character idea for Faith and bulking up her backstory and behavioral traits.
Catalyst is also far enough removed from the original Mirror's Edge that players who didn't play the first game won't feel dazed by the second.
"People who have played the first game will recognize some elements, but for Catalyst, the city is new, Faith herself is similar-ish, but we never really delved too much into her in the first game," Ermgard explained. "Her personality now is more fleshed out. The game is about her personal journey, I would say. Of course there's this big plot about getting involved against oppression and all that stuff, but the more important story is her journey, who she becomes and where she starts out and what happens along the way to make her into the person that she is."
There is a lot of affection among DICE's developers for Faith. Ermgard, who has been working on Mirror's Edge for three years, is personally attached to her, speaking of her like she were his own daughter. The game isn't just about the developers' journey to completion; it's about them giving Faith a rich world and story they feel will best help her grow.
"In the first game, there was not that much of her personality," Ermgard said. "I didn't myself feel like she went through any large change throughout that game, and so the person she is there is maybe more or less the person she is now... But now she's even more fleshed out, and there's more of her. There are more events in her life that explain who she is, and this is, in a way, a coming of age storyline, in that she will come to understand the impact that she has on the people in this society around her. She'll start out her journey a bit more careless, a bit more selfish, a bit more immortal and then realize along the way that's not the case, and I think that transformation people can hopefully relate to.
"She is a complex young woman," he continued. "I hope that she'll be relatable. I think she is, because she's very human, even though she does these things that would be considered superhuman. But she's no superhero. We're very clear about that. Her skills are skills that she acquired that all people could if they really dedicated themselves. But still, I think she is both someone to aspire to, and someone to empathize with."
Eager fans will be able to get a small taste of Faith's new story in Mirror's Edge: Exordium, a comic book series that will detail events leading up to the start of Mirror's Edge: Catalyst. The six-issue run will begin on September 9, with one issue releasing each month until the game releases on February 23, 2016.
"I think you see coming of age stories all the time, but I've got to say, I haven't really seen Faith's type," Ermgard said of Faith's story. "She's not a superhero. I think that in itself is different and she exists in a world that is in many ways similar to and inspired by the one we live in today. Of course, it's been beautified and taken to the extreme, but I think that combo is something special."