Vol. 2, Issue 28 - What Iwata did for Pokémon
A tribute to the late Satoru Iwata, former President and CEO of Nintendo, and his contribution to Pokémon. Additionally, this issue has a recap of the latest Pokémon news, and more from our mailbag
Welcome to Vol. 2, issue 28 of the Johto Times newsletter. In this week’s edition, I am sharing a special feature to reflect on Nintendo’s late president and CEO Satoru Iwata, and highlight what he did for Pokémon. Today, July 11th, 2024, marks nine years since Iwata passed away due to complications from an operation to remove a tumour from his bile duct.
In addition to this feature, I have a recap of the latest Pokémon news, plus more from the Johto Times mailbag.
Be sure to share our newsletter with your friends and loved ones and help us reach even more Pokémon fans. For Discord users, you’re welcome to join our server for the latest notifications from our project. We are still open to sharing your mailbag entries, so if you have anything you would like to share with us, drop us a line by visiting this link to contact us directly!
News
Pokémon GO recently celebrated its eighth anniversary on July 6th, 2024. The Pokémon GO team at Niantic released a statement to say they have been "overjoyed seeing Trainers from across the world and all walks of life come together with their passion for exploring, catching, battling, making new friends, and learning more about Pokémon over the last eight years”. The statement went on to say that they have "continued to grow Pokémon GO with features, events, new ways to discover Pokémon, and more".
Source: Pokémon GO
Japanese underwear brand HIPSHOP has added six new Pokémon designs to its men's collection. The "Pokémon Series" line began in July 2020 with six products, and has since grown to thirty with latest additions, which include Koraidon, Miraidon, Sprigatito, Fuecoco, Quaxly, and a further Pikachu design. Sadly these aren’t available outside of Japan, which is probably for the best because I want to buy them all!
Source: HIPSHOP
Feature: What Iwata did for Pokémon
Satoru Iwata is a name that Nintendo fans, gamers, and professionals across the video games industry know and respect. For those unfamiliar with his work, Iwata-san was a capable video game programmer, designer, and company president who played an integral part in the localisation of Pokémon Red & Green to the west, and assisted in the founding of Creatures Inc., The Pokémon Company, and so much more. One of his final contributions before he passed away was his role in the development of Pokémon GO during the planning stages. In this feature, I aim to highlight and pay tribute to Iwata-san, and the impact he had on our favourite franchise.
Iwata began his career in the games industry at HAL Laboratories as a part-time programmer, and produced his first commercial game in 1983 – a port of the arcade game Joust. He worked closely with Nintendo and produced several titles for the Nintendo Entertainment System. By 1993, HAL had fallen into debt, and Nintendo’s then-president Hiroshi Yamauchi insisted that Iwata become its president, who helped to stabilise its finances and turn its fortunes around.
In 1999, Pokémon Snap was developed by HAL and released for the Nintendo 64. Originally, the game wasn’t going to feature Pokémon at all, but in an Iwata Asks interview for Kirby’s Epic Yarn (October 2010), it was revealed by Satoru Iwata that Pokémon were the best subjects to be photographed, as players would enjoy taking pictures of them. In the book “Ask Iwata”, legendary game designer Shigeru Miyamoto said that Iwata-san had stressed the importance of what should be photographed. He said, “Miyamoto, I think it’s Pokémon. That’s what the people really want to photograph”. Thanks to Iwata’s advice, Pokémon became the guiding principle for the game.
During the development of Pokémon Gold & Silver, Game Freak were overwhelmed by their workload. Not only were they working on the sequel to the highly successful Red & Green titles, they were preparing to localise the original games for release in the west. In addition to this, they were also working on the Japanese-exclusive Pokémon Stadium. Unfortunately, the code for Pokémon Red & Green was convoluted, and no documentation existed to effectively port the battle system over to Pokémon Stadium. This meant that only the four programmers who worked on the original game could work on it, taking resources away from the sequels.
At the time, Iwata-san was a board member at Creatures Inc. but he ended up being involved in discovering the most appropriate way to localise the games outside of Japan. Iwata obtained the source code for Pokémon Red & Green and studied it. Eventually, Iwata was able to understand the code, re-work it, and decide how the game should be localised, relaying his findings back to Nintendo.
![Iwata during an interview with Junichi Masuda (Director, now Chief Creative Fellow), and Tsunekazu Ishihara (President and CEO) in 2013 Iwata during an interview with Junichi Masuda (Director, now Chief Creative Fellow), and Tsunekazu Ishihara (President and CEO) in 2013](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa2257a99-06b5-4a18-9c69-f3e220224a8e_1280x720.jpeg)
Iwata-san then went on to analyse Pokémon Red & Green’s battle logic, a difficult task since the games had no specification document. Despite this, Iwata was able to port the battle system over to Pokémon Stadium and got it working in just one week, something that surprised Shigeki Morimoto, the programmer who originally created it. Thanks to Iwata’s assistance, both of these significant hurdles had been removed from Game Freak’s to-do list, allowing the team to focus their attention exclusively on Pokémon Gold & Silver.
If all of this wasn’t enough, Iwata created the image compression tools for Pokémon Gold & Silver which were an improvement upon the original algorithm, making it faster for the game to load assets.
One popular story about Iwata is that his compression tools saved space, allowing Game Freak to fit Kanto into the cartridge. However, a Reddit post by user danimalforlife went into a lot of depth about the topic, and debunks this rumour.
Iwata left HAL and joined Nintendo in June 2000 as the head of its corporate planning division. One of his first tasks in the role was the formation of The Pokémon Company. Due to the success and popularity of Pokémon after the release of Gold & Silver, a new organisation was required to licence, produce, publish and market Pokémon, as well as manage the Pokémon Center business. This allowed the company to expand the scope of the brand in Japan and overseas. The Pokémon Company operates to this day, and is led by the three companies which hold the Pokémon copyright – Nintendo, Game Freak, and Creatures Inc.
![Iwata during an interview with Junichi Masuda (Director, now Chief Creative Fellow), and Tsunekazu Ishihara (President and CEO) in 2013 Iwata during an interview with Junichi Masuda (Director, now Chief Creative Fellow), and Tsunekazu Ishihara (President and CEO) in 2013](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb6a9aeee-6228-491e-ae22-dfe46fc1adbf_1280x720.jpeg)
Sadly, Iwata-san passed away on July 11th, 2015, due to a tumour in his bile duct which had been discovered a year prior in June 2014. Two weeks before his death, he had been hospitalised, and despite being confined to a bed, he was still working. According to Japanese business website Nikkei, one of the final projects Iwata contributed to was Pokémon GO, where he was closely involved in the development from the planning stage and exchanging views with TPC’s President, Tsunekazu Ishihara.
In October 2015, Satoru Iwata was voted unanimously by judges to receive the Golden Joystick Awards Lifetime Achievement Award. On December 3rd of that year, retired COO of Nintendo of America Reggie Fils-Aimé paid a heartfelt tribute to him during The Game Awards. In 2016, the DICE Awards also bestowed their Lifetime Achievement prize to the late Satoru Iwata.
The credits of Star Fox Zero for the Wii U share a tribute in memory of Iwata that states: "This game is dedicated to our wingman who fell in battle". Soon after the announcement of his death, tributes from fans were left at the Nintendo World Store in New York City. Many developers and game companies paid tribute to Iwata on social media, highlighting how much he would be missed.
As a Nintendo fan, I was first introduced to Iwata-san through his E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) presentations, most notably at E3 2005 where he revealed Nintendo Wii (codenamed Revolution) to the world for the very first time and announced that it would have a Virtual Console capable of downloading games from older platforms. He was the face of the Nintendo Direct presentations when they began in 2011, and shared many notable video game announcements in a fun and entertaining way, directly to us. Because of all this, I felt a connection to Iwata, the man who was there for over a decade, providing me with great gaming experiences to look forward to.
Unfortunately, I didn’t learn of Iwata’s contribution to Pokémon until after his death, but once I read about the huge accomplishments he made for the series, I appreciated him even more, and for that I’m immensely thankful. From his time at HAL working on Pokémon Snap, right up to Pokémon GO in the days before his passing, Satoru Iwata’s influence on Pokémon was substantial. It’s not very often I cry, but hearing that Iwata had passed away, it brought me to tears. This wonderful man who was responsible for so many cherished memories may no longer be here, but my respect for everything he did will be there forever.
Thank you Iwata-san. Your support for Pokémon will never be forgotten.
Mailbag
As always, I love to hear from our readers here at Johto Times who share some great things for our mailbag, and it’s a pleasure to share them with other like-minded people. This week I am really happy to see a letter from Tristan, a familiar face and supporter of the Johto Times who has sent in a question!
If you could go back and change any one game, which one would it be and how would you change it?
Tristan Steffen, North Carolina, United States
Hey Tristan! It’s fantastic to hear from you again, and thank you for your question! If I was fortunate to ever work on a Pokémon game, I would choose Pokémon GO. When the COVID-19 pandemic came in, Pokémon GO had to reinvent itself. A game which encouraged you to go outside and explore suddenly needed you to stay at home. The game was adapted so that people could still enjoy the game, and as a consequence, allowed people who normally wouldn’t have been able to play Pokémon GO to get involved.
When government-mandated restrictions were eased and Pokémon GO reversed its changes, many players who were able to enjoy the game thanks to the new features were suddenly unable to play the game again. In my view, this was wrong. I would immediately reintroduce some of the changes, which made the game more accessible for fans who couldn’t get out. I would make Remote Raid Passes cheaper, more available, and offer the same bonuses no matter where they were in the world. I completely respect that the game offers a positive message of urging players to get out and explore the world around them. However it is important to recognise that there are people who are unable to do so due to disabilities, health, or feeling uncomfortable in groups. These players matter, and I would ensure they had the same opportunities to enjoy Pokémon GO and not be left behind again.