Remembering Satoru Iwata: 1959-2015
Satoru Iwata was the former CEO of Nintendo before sadly leaving us all a year ago. He was a great man that did a lot for the gaming industry, through making the Nintendo Wii & DS to introduce causal audiences into the world of gaming too having big roles in many iconic Nintendo franchises like Earthbound, Kirby, Pokemon & Super Smash Brothers.
Today, I wish to honor this man for working with Hal Laboratories in making one of my favorite Nintendo franchises; Kirby.
Kirby was a creation from Hal, the gaming studio Iwata worked with early in his career and meet Smash Brothers creator Sakari while working with Hal. The studio worked to make impressive NES games for Nintendo and later on made Kirby Dreamland on the Game Boy.
Kirby didn’t copy foe’s powers yet but the game was simple fun with the end goal being this: Everyone can have fun with our product.
In hindsight, this process continued with many of the products Iwata worked on in the future; the DS & Wii having that embedded in its ideologies for example.
Kirby became a stable Nintendo franchise after the release of Kirby’s Adventure, a late NES title from Hal and Kirby continues to be a fantastic series today. It is one of my favorite Nintendo franchises due to how it blends great platforming with colorful visuals and creative mechanics through Kriby’s ability to adapt to the world around him. It also birthed some of my favorite spin-off games in the IP, mainly Air Ride which was a racing game only using ONE button and Canvas Curse which was a DS game where Kirby was cursed to be a ball and you can only control him with the DS’s touch screen. Both are fantastic titles and the later sold me on what the DS can do with touch screen technology; games with deep mechanics CAN work with inventive control methods.
So, just want to say, thank you Iwata for trying to focus on fun and inventive ways to make gaming more inviting & for being one of the fathers behind one of my favorite Nintendo franchises. With the looming future arrival of the Nintendo NX on the horizon and the breakout success of Pokemon Go, your ideas and concepts will forever live on in the future.