In Memoriam 2015
On this page we pay tribute to all the people who worked or participated in the world of video games and passed away in 2015.
You will view people by the year they died, remembering a little more about their work and their importance in the history of games.
Satoru Iwata
Satoru Iwata (岩田 聡) was the fourth president of Nintendo, serving from 2002 until his death in 2015.
He started out as a programmer at HAL Laboratory and became famous for his speed and for creating lean codes that worked perfectly. A great example of his skill was with the game Pokémon Gold, where the developers were having trouble fitting the game onto the cartridge, and with his help they not only managed to fix the game but also had the opportunity to include the map from the game Pokémon Red/Blue as well. He also saved the production of the game Earthbound, giving the option of restarting the code from scratch in order to complete the project. Super Smash Bros. was another game that also had the help of Satoru Iwata.
In 2002 Iwata became president of Nintendo, succeeding Hiroshi Yamauchi. Under his direction, the company developed two consoles that were very successful both critically and financially: Nintendo DS and Wii. The success he achieved with these devices led to him being named one of the 30 greatest CEOs in 2009.
However, the launch of the Wii U and 3DS were not as successful as the previous consoles, causing Nintendo to operate at a financial loss for the first time in 30 years. As a result, Iwata cut his salary in half between 2011 and 2014 to cut costs.
In addition, seeing the growth of the mobile market, Iwata began to focus on this market by partnering with companies to develop games using Nintendo's IPs.
Unfortunately, Iwata would not see the results and success of Nintendo with the Switch that he helped create. In 2014, he discovered cancer, which he successfully removed, but which would return in 2015 and thus cause his death on July 11.