Iwata

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwHZwvTdnPI]

To unlock Ness in the the first Super Smash Bros., you need to beat the 1-player game on Normal difficulty with three lives. This is objectively not even a little bit hard to do, but I was a 6-year-old when I got the game, so it was basically impossible.

I spent months trying. I played exclusively as Donkey Kong, because Donkey Kong was both huge and a gorilla so he was obviously the strongest character and best suited to the task. I marveled at Jason, the 5th-grader from my bus stop who informed me that it was in fact not at all hard to unlock Ness. Time and time again I reached Master Hand, the final boss, sometimes with all three of my lives intact, and time and time again I would be vanquished. Eventually, Master Hand had beaten me so many times that I had been able to compose a theme song for myself called “The Great Blue Donkey Kong” that I bleated at the top of my tiny, stupid lungs in the hopes that it would make me play better (it did not). I didn’t actually unlock the plucky little psychic wonder until years later, but fortunately I had access to the catharsis of owning my little sister at the multiplayer.

Super Smash Bros. and the memories I have of it were created by two people: Masahiro Sakurai, still the head of development of the now storied franchise, and Satoru Iwata, creator of Earthbound and Ness, and, until his death on July 11, 2015, the President of Nintendo.

Iwata once said “Video games are meant to just be one thing: Fun. Fun for everyone.” It might at first seem glib or meaningless, but during his tenure it was what set his company apart from everyone else. As Nintendo’s competitors’ strategies converged in the age of paid downloadable content, an arms race of technological and graphical prowess, and competitive online testosterone carnivals, Iwata knew he had to play a different game, so to speak.

So he oversaw the development of the Wii and the Nintendo DS, systems built on the idea that video games controlled by being touched or moving around just *make sense,* and that it was important to make games make sense because everybody should be able to play. Others were willing to embrace the status of games as a niche pastime, but Nintendo had a hunch that humans are united by our desire to play — we are all gamers so long as we know that we’re welcome to game. “Today there are people who play and who don’t,” Iwata said prior to the release of the Wii. “We’ll help destroy that wall between them.”

And so the world came together, friends and grandparents and partners and children flailing around our living rooms to smack virtual tennis balls at each other, to exercise poorly and hilariously, to save Hyrule a few times more. We caught ‘em all and Crossed Animals and Smashed Brothers and raced blue shells in tow through beautiful impossible worlds and we did it together, cheering and groaning and high-fiving and laughing.

The Wii and DS were by far the most financially successful consoles of their generation, on a less important note.

Before he was President, Iwata’s development résumé was extensive. He created Super Smash Bros. and Earthbound and Kirby. He likely saved the Pokémon series when he single-handedly reprogrammed Gold and Silver to fit the Johto and Kanto regions in the minuscule 2 MB Game Boy cartridge — Gamefreak previously could not even fit Johto in the game. Considered a genius of programming, he was brought in to push out Super Smash Bros. Melee and Pokémon Stadium in time when their respective development teams were on track to miss their deadlines by months (he succeeded). After becoming President, he led perhaps the only video game company in the world that still understood that that the best way to make money was to care more about fun than money.

If you’ve played a Nintendo game in the past 13 years (and you have) you’ve taken part in Iwata’s vision.

If for just one moment, you were playing a game with your loved ones and became so lost in the ridiculous, joyous diversion that the weight of this too often dark world fell away, then you lived what he wanted — this silly old uncle that donned Luigi costumes and kung fu fought Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime and loved games maybe even more than we did.

Iwata-san, you told us that video games are meant to be fun for everyone, and I really hope you were right.

It would only be fair if you had as much fun making your games as we did playing them.

On my business card, I am a corporate president.

In my mind, I am a game developer.

But in my heart, I am a gamer.