Nintendo President Satoru Iwata dead at age 55

Atomika

Apparently he had been in poor health, though he had not revealed this publicly.

From Kotaku:

Nintendo has just issued a short statement announcing that president Satoru Iwata has passed away at the age of 55.

The statement reads:

Nintendo Co., Ltd. deeply regrets to announce that President Satoru Iwata passed away on July 11, 2015 due to a bile duct growth.
Iwata was forced to skip last year’s E3 due to his poor health, and shortly afterwards underwent surgery to remove the bile duct growth. A few months later, in the wake of concerns over his health, he said via Twitter “I’m progressing well”.

Iwata first joined Nintendo’s HAL Laboratory in the 1980s, where he worked on games like Balloon Fight and EarthBound. He became a Director of the company in 2000, and in 2002 was appointed as only the fourth President of Nintendo when he succeeded Hiroshi Yamauchi.

In his time as President, Iwata oversaw some of the strongest (Wii, DS) and weakest (GameCube, Wii U) periods in Nintendo’s history as a video game company. In recent times, he developed almost cult status as the host of the Nintendo Direct programs.

An immensely popular figure both within the industry and with Nintendo fans, he will be sorely missed.

Needless to say, whatever your opinion of him or his tenure as director of Nintendo, this is a shocking development that will ring through the industry for some time to come. Farewell, Mr. Iwata. Gone far too soon.

Dark Raven X

This comes as something of a shock. There had been rumblings of a problem for a while, but nothing anyone paid attention to; he'd been missing shareholder meetings etc. We all assumed he was too busy being a goddamned treasure.

He was pretty solely responsible for cultivating the current Nintendo fandom, the people who tune into watch their mini E3s year round, and who treat him, Miyamoto, Reggie and Sakurai as mascots rather than boring CEOs. He was a cool guy, and I'll miss him.

No-Quarter

Wooooow. I remember the theories as to why he had skipped E3.

Mr Khan

Huh, at the time the bile duct cancer thing came out, some people commented that it has a very low survival rate. To that end, it wasn't unexpected except that he had been putting up a front that things were going well.

Not wanting investors, employees, or fans to be worried about him. Seems to be what he wanted.

Godspeed to you, one of a generation of developer-businessmen who we will not see again. HAL engineer, CEO, muppet, banana-ponderer.