Satoru Iwata

Satoru Iwata was a Japanese businessman and programmer who served as the fourth president and CEO of Nintendo until his death. Before becoming president, he was renowned for his programming skill, having worked at HAL Laboratory.

Programming Skill

• Disassembled programs by writing their memory dumps by hand from his first computer. (source)
• Bypassed the HP-67 calculator’s program limit of 224 steps per program by using six different magnetic cards to create a Star-Trek themed game. (source) (Considered himself the ’number one master’ of calculators in Japan at the time.)
• Ported the Pokémon Red and Green battle logic to the Nintendo 64 in about a week without any documentation. (source) (Impressed others with his ability to grasp a complex program in a short time.)
• Created the compression tools for Pokémon Gold and Silver. (source)
• Programmed Mother 2 (Earthbound) from scratch in approximately half a year, after four years of it being unplayable. (source) (Additional Context: The game uses an advanced scripting language that is difficult to map out or edit, resembling a CPU.)
• Continued programming during his free time (nights and days off) even while serving as a manager, until he was 40 years old. (source)
• Developed the original prototype for “Super Smash Bros.” for Nintendo 64 along with Masahiro Sakurai. (source)
• Spent approximately three weeks debugging “Super Smash Bros. Melee” to ensure it met its release date, despite his role as General Manager of Corporate Planning at Nintendo. (source) (Performed code reviews, fixed bugs, and directed others based on bug reports.)