What Iwata did for Pokémon
A tribute to the late Satoru Iwata, former President and CEO of Nintendo, and his contribution to 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-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.
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.