Satoru Iwata, CEO of Nintendo, has died. Aged 55 of a preventable cancer, pretty scary stuff.
He was a truly great games developer, but didn't get involved in the development of games very often nowadays, being the CEO, but when he did they were great. He worked on Super Mario Sunshine as well as LoZ The Wind Waker and Metroid Prime.
He wasn't a celebrity outside of gaming circles in the same way Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were outside their own respective fields, but by rights he should have been. The man was a true prodigy of video game programming and has accomplished feats that would make John Carmack blush. He single handedly coded the game Earthbound from scratch after a team of devs couldn't pull it together and make it work. He coded Pokemon Gold so well and so efficiently it allowed the Gamefreak team to add the region from the Red and Blue into the game as well on the same sized cartridge. His accomplishments aren't sexy or sensational, but they were great nonetheless and his death is a massive loss to the industry.
Wasn't he always popping up in quirky videos and stuff along with Miyamoto? When a chief exec does stuff like that you know they have a passion for the business.
Yeah, this nintendo's E3 was all done via puppets and they got a lot of flack for their E3 stuff, actually the last thing he did publicly was apologise to fans for this years presentation.
