Iwata was the first President of Nintendo to cut his teeth on programming video games before ever ascending to the position, but what characterized his career most strongly was how he retained a developer's mindset even after succeeding President Yamauchi. With Iwata gone, the future of the column is uncertain. His policies of openness between developers and fans lead to the creation of Iwata Asks, a column hosted on Nintendo's official site in which he would interview game developers about their upcoming projects. His revolutionary direction as President fundamentally changed Nintendo into a developer for more than just gamers, achieving a level of proliferation with the Wii that the press could never have anticipated. The handheld Kirby games filled many long car rides across the United States, and in each of his games a small piece of Iwata's soul touched our lives. Even now the arguments over whether Marth or Roy was better still come to mind. Melee, on which many sleepovers and afternoons were spent. We first came to know Iwata through his work on Super Smash Bros. While Iwata is famous for reprogramming EarthBound from scratch midway through its development, for this editor Iwata's greatest accomplishments were in the late 90s and early 2000s. Several of his contributions only became known years after the fact, and there's likely still more that will never be public knowledge. Composing an exhaustive list of all the games he contributed to in life is likely impossible Iwata was a constant presence working alongside Nintendo's development staff even after ascending to the position of President, and for every game he worked on there lies a story and more uncredited work behind it. Iwata is someone that we cannot write about impersonally. Nintendo has lost its greatest President, and the fans have lost one of their best friends. Since 2002 his radical vision for the future has repeatedly redefined the company's position in relation to the rest of the market, and set it above and beyond the scope of competing developers.

Born on December 6th 1959 (ShЕЌwa 34), Iwata died at the too-young age of fifty-five, making his thirteen years the shortest reign of any President of Nintendo. It was this same condition which prevented his presence at E3 last year, for which he had undergone surgery. Today Nintendo announced the death of Iwata Satoru on July 11th 2015, from a cancerous growth in his bile duct.

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