Satoru Iwata, president and CEO of Nintendo, has died, the company said on its website today. Iwata was 55.
"Nintendo Co., Ltd. deeply regrets to announce that President Satoru Iwata passed away on July 11, 2015 due to a bile duct growth," the brief statement read.
Iwata took the helm of Nintendo in 2002. He was only the company's fourth president since its founding in 1889, and the only president not descended from the founding Yamauchi family.
Iwata was a rarity in the gaming industry: a corporate president whose background was in game programming. He joined the Tokyo-based developer HAL Laboratory fresh out of college in the early 80s, and immediately began working as a programmer, helping to create classic games like Balloon Fight and the Kirby's Dream Land series for Nintendo.
After taking the top slot at Nintendo, Iwata implemented a tremendous turnaround of the company's fortunes, launching the incredibly successful Nintendo DS and Wii consoles a few years later. His passion for games was evinced most strongly in public through his prolific "Iwata Asks" interviews, in which he picked the brains of Nintendo's developers in ways that only he could, eliciting fascinating details about Nintendo's creative process.
Nintendo first discussed Iwata's health issues a little over a year ago when it said that surgery on his bile duct would keep the CEO from attending the 2014 E3 Expo. When he started appearing again in Nintendo livestreamed videos after E3, he had lost a significant amount of weight.
Iwata missed this year's E3 as well, but continued to work, as he fully participated in the most recent meeting of Nintendo shareholders on June 26.
The loss of such a tremendous talent as Iwata will surely have a serious impact on Nintendo as it continues into what it has called a "transitional" phase. The sudden loss of its well-liked, whip-smart, passionate leader at such a young age is surely a hammerlike blow from which it must now attempt to recover.
Even the very medium of videogames itself is now significantly worse off for the loss of such a talented creator and passionate advocate. Iwata's untimely absence will be sorely felt.
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