It was announced today that Nintendo’s president since 2002, Satoru Iwata, passed away due to complications with a bile duct growth.
We’ll be the first to admit that Iwatasan didn’t always lead Nintendo in directions that we would have liked and largely continued his predecessor, Hiroshi Yamauchi’s Luddite anti-Internet and anti-groundbreaking graphical technology ways, but there is no doubt that Iwata took Nintendo from its GameCube slump back into the limelight with off the wall ideas like touchscreens and motion controls that forever changed how we all interact with personal electronics today.
It will be interesting to see where Nintendo goes now and what kind of person its fifth president will be, but the fact remains that Iwatasan is holding bananas in the sky now and he left a lasting legacy.