On July 13, 2015, the day Nintendo announced that president Satoshi Iwata had died of a cholangiocar tumor, and the fall of the 55-year-old president shocked the entire game industry. The reason for this is that Nintendo is not just an ordinary game company, it carries too many people's memories, and its every move also affects the direction of the entire game industry.
Why did Satoshi Iwata's death attract so much attention? After Satoshi Iwata's death, how this century-old Japanese store will change has to start with Nintendo.
The starting point of Nintendo
Before Satoshi Iwata became its fourth president, Nintendo was a complete family business, and Nintendo's first president, Kanoro Yamauchi, started by making "flower cards", and was first a small shop selling cards, Yamauchi Fangnoro officially established Nintendo in 1889, and in 1929 passed it on to his son-in-law Yamauchi Jira as the second president of Nintendo.
It was not until 1949, when Yamauchi's grandson Yamauchi Took over as the third president, Nintendo began to have a huge change, first Yamauchi reorganized the company, forced some family ministers, and began to go out of Japan, so that the dying Nintendo cooperated with Disney and began to shine in the global card business.
Nintendo set up a game department in 1969, developed a lot of hardware-based games, many people's understanding of Nintendo began from FC (commonly known as red and white machines), but in fact Nintendo began to produce video games related hardware very early, more famous is the 1979 launch of Game & Watch, this little black accompanied a lot of children in the 80s, until the Wii version of the "Nintendo Brawl" This role has appeared.
In 1983, Nintendo officially launched FC, since then opened Nintendo's first generation of hegemony, followed by the launch of the handheld game console Gameboy in 1989, and the launch of SFC in 1990 (commonly known as Super Nintendo, Super Nintendo) have achieved great success, at this time Nintendo's opponent SEGA, even if the launch of Genesis, is still not able to compete with the entertainment trend brought by Nintendo, many software vendors have moved closer to Nintendo, such as "Super Mario", "Final Fantasy", "The Legend of Zelda" Epoch-making works such as "Dragon Quest" and "Street Fighter" were launched at this time, and these works became classics, and the degree of influence even laid the foundation for the development of today's game types.
Yamauchi was a traditional and typical Japanese power leader, but his life did not succeed forever, and then Nintendo's N64 abandoned the CD-ROM because of its adherence to the cassette policy. Instead, it forced Sony's PlayStation to emerge, and also took away most of the family game console, and the subsequent NGC was inferior to the PS2, Yamauchi knew that he no longer had the ability to lead Nintendo, and handed over the baton to Satoshi Iwata, who was still shallow in Nintendo in 2002.
Satoshi Iwata, who was born as a man of Nintendo
Satoshi Iwata came from a political family and joined Nintendo's studio "HAL Research Institute" after graduating from Tokyo Institute of Technology, and the traditional Iwata family naturally did not support him in this line of work, but the enthusiasm for games and programs still made Satoshi Iwata hesitate to talk to his father for half a year, and resolutely threw himself into his own interest.
Satoshi Iwata is a programming developer, so he doesn't have the nickname "Father of XX" like the average game producer. But the most iconic work developed at the beginning was "Balloon Wars" on FC. Later, he worked on well-known works such as "Kirby of the Stars", "Earth Adventure 2", "Nintendo Brawl" and so on. Satoshi Iwata was also known as a genius programmer, and the most famous quote at the time was: "Programmers who are game developers do not have the right to say 'no', because when they say no, they have denied all possibilities of creation."
In 1992, HAL declared bankruptcy under the bubble economy, due to Yamauchi's unique vision, even though Satoshi Iwata did not have any management experience at that time, he was promoted to the president of HAL, and Satoshi Iwata did not fulfill his mission to develop works such as "Star Kirby" and "Earth Adventure 2", making HAL the biggest second-party developer under Nintendo, Satoshi Iwata had actually saved a company before becoming president of Nintendo.
In 2000, Satoshi Iwata was transferred from HAL to Nintendo Headquarters as a director and director of the Management planning department, and only two years later, Yamauchi handed over the century-old shop to Satoshi Iwata, who also led Nintendo until his death, so Satoshi Iwata can be said to have completely dedicated his life to this company.
Disputed closed policy
During his tenure as president, Satoshi Iwata inherited the concept of Yamauchi, and as a result, many "policies" look at investors, and Satoshi Iwata is really a stubborn stone that never nods. At the time of the rise of smartphones, Satoshi Iwata had publicly believed that smartphones would not be a threat to gaming institutions, and insisted on Nintendo's strategy of moving towards a "soft and hardware family", because in order to master the software itself to have the most perfect performance.
In addition, social games, and even the gacha games common in today's mobile phones, are also scorned, believing that these games are expensive and will not last long. He insisted on the so-called "value of real games", and even though Nintendo had begun to lose money year by year in recent years, Satoshi Iwata still insisted on such a policy.
Even after the Wii went downhill and the WiiU was released, Nintendo's performance has never improved, and although the handheld 3DS sales are OK, the sales of the 3DS have not kept pace with the NDS of the previous game due to the erosion of the smart device in the mobile market. Satoshi Iwata finally recognized the huge changes brought about by smartphone games, and worked with DeNA to award its IP to DeNA to develop games together, and even responded at the strategic cooperation conference: "I never deny that it is wrong to make games on mobile devices." However, this cooperation has not yet seen results, and Satoshi Iwata has already returned to the west.
The giant who single-handedly leads Nintendo
Under the Nintendo led by Satoshi Iwata, the first decision was to abandon the GameBoy series that had been revamped many times, and instead developed the NDS on the upper and lower screens, and this dual-screen handheld allowed Nintendo to open the second generation of hegemony, although the PSP launched by the rival Sony was higher than the NDS in hardware performance, but the sales of the NDS were far behind the PSP. By the end of 2012, NDS had sold 152.5 million units, the highest-selling handheld console in history, and many well-known works were born on NDS, such as Pokémon Black, White, Gold, and Silver, Tengu Ren, and Forest of Animals.
In terms of home consoles, after the decline of N64 and NGC, Nintendo launched the Wii is to open a new blue ocean of somatosensory games, the grand situation of the crowd rush to buy that year believes that many people are still remembering, Wii although the successor is weak but also sold nearly 100 million units; and Nintendo's debut game "Wii Sport" released in the Wii at that time showed extremely high gameplay with four sports, selling more than 40.5 million sets, becoming the best-selling game in history, and breaking the game must be exquisite graphics, Myths like huge plots.
As for the success of NS later, various IPs shined, no doubt thanks to the solid foundation laid by Satoshi Iwata.
In any case, Satoshi Iwata led Nintendo for more than ten years, bringing a happy childhood to all game lovers in the world, and he is a game giant who should be admired by millions of people.