Nintendo Co Ltd President and CEO Satoru Iwata passed away this weekend at the age of 55 “due to a bile duct growth,” Nintendo said in a statement.

Iwata had led Nintendo since the heyday of the Gamecube, and his reign at the 125-year-old Japanese game company saw the meteoric rise of the Wii and Nintendo DS. Despite the more recent disappointment of the Wii U, which failed to live up to the success of its predecessor, Iwata’s career spanned an important era in Nintendo’s history.

HAL Laboratory

Iwata’s gaming career began at HAL Laboratory, where he joined the studio as its fifth employee in 1980.

“I had the distinction of joining the smallest company of any graduate in my class,” Iwata said later in life. “I was a programmer, an engineer and a designer. I also ordered a lot of takeaway food, and I helped clean up.”

HAL, which is named after the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, produced several games for Nintendo, starting with the original Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). These included titles that were popular in Japan like Mother, but the studio is best known for the immensely popular Super Smash Bros franchise, which brings together an all star cast of Nintendo character for multiplayer brawlers that have spawned highly competitive esports tournaments.

While he started at HAL as a programmer, Iwata would later become head of the studio in the early 1990s when it became a second-party partner with Nintendo under then-president Hiroshi Yamauchi, who headed Nintendo for over 50 years and was the third and last of the company’s founding family to hold that position.

First years at Nintendo

HAL held a close relationship with Nintendo throughout the ’90s, and Iwata became increasingly more involved with the company through his work on the Pokemon series. Soon after HAL released the first Super Smash Bros title in 1999, Iwata joined Nintendo full-time as the head of its corporate planning division.

According to Iwata, the original Smash Bros was the final game he was involved with as a game maker.

“My actual last work on programming happened when I was working as the general manager of corporate planning at Nintendo,” he said during a 2014 interview. “Something happened and the Gamecube version of Super Smash Brothers didn’t look like it was going to make its release date so I sort of did a code review for it (Wry Laugh).”

Nintendo President

In 2002, Hiroshi Yamauchi retired as head of Nintendo after leading the company since 1949. His time with the company included the entire history of Nintendo as a video game console maker, from its beginnings with the “Family Computer” Famicom (the Japanese name for the NES) up through the early years of the Nintendo Gamecube.

Iwata was chosen as his replacement, and he the first non-Yamauchi family head of the company since its founding in 1889. He inherited the company during a difficult time, as the Gamecube was having trouble competing with Sony Corp’s incredibly popular PlayStation 2 console.

While the Gamecube was, and still is, popular with dedicated Nintendo fans, it only sold a fraction of the units of the PlayStation 2, which was the most successful console ever at the time.

Nintendo needed to bring something new and exciting to the table for its next console release, and under Iwata’s leadership, the company developed the Nintendo Wii, which combined fun, accessible games with unique motion controls and an affordable price tag.

“I do not intend to declare how many Wii we will be selling today, but Wii will be a failure if it cannot sell far more than GameCube did,” Iwata said during a 2006 corporate management briefing. “In fact, we shouldn’t continue this business if our only target is to outsell GameCube. Naturally, we are making efforts so that Wii will show a far greater result than GameCube.”

Not only did the Wii outsell the Gamecube, but the console was a runaway hit, selling over 100 million units in its lifetime and overcoming the shadow of the PlayStation 2 to become the most successful game console of all time.

While the Wii’s successor, the Wii U, failed to match its predecessor’s outstanding success, Iwata’s reign at Nintendo was mostly a positive one, and he is remembered fondly by his peers, including Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto.

Iwata’s role at Nintendo seems to have been a dream come true for the one-time game programmer. At a keynote at GDC 2005, Iwata explained that his place in the industry was more than a job.

“On my business card, I am a corporate president,” Iwata said. “In my mind, I am a game developer. But in my heart, I am a gamer.”

Photo by Debris2008