Satoru Iwata obituary
Nintendo chief executive who helped bring video games to a family audienceSatoru Iwata, who has died aged 55 of a bile duct tumour, was that rarest of beasts: the president and CEO of a giant company who retained the human touch and nurtured a relationship with his consumers that felt personal. As the man who had held the reins at the colossal video games company Nintendo since 2002, he did more than anyone else to bring video games to a mainstream, family audience. He presided over the launches of the Nintendo DS handheld gaming system - the second-most successful console to date, after Sony's PlayStation 2 - and the Nintendo Wii, with its innovative, much-copied motion-sensing, TV remote-style controller, which appealed to a generation that had previously found video games intimidating.
Genial, approachable and solicitous in person, and always with a humorous glint in his eye, Iwata never conformed to the stereotype of the haughty CEO - although he was forced to take plenty of tough decisions in the harsh Japanese corporate world, where shareholders' responses to quarterly results hold sway and losing face is not an option. Uniquely among CEOs of the games industry's leading players, he began his working life as a programmer, and retained a lifelong enthusiasm for making and playing games.
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