Former Nintendo of America CEO, Tatsumi Kimishima, was announced today as the late Satoru Iwata’s replacement as President of Nintendo of Japan.  Kimishima was Reggie’s precursor from 2002-2006 as well as serving for a year as president of Pokemon USA.

In contrast to Iwata’s tenure as a game creator, Kimishima is more of a corporate businessman so it will be interesting to see what direction he takes Nintendo as it perches at the edge of deciding if it wants to be properly competitive in the console and mobile markets or if it wants to stick to doing it’s own thing (which has been working less well in recent years).

Kimishima has pledged to continue on the path that Iwatasan had laid out for the company, but time will tell whether or not this is the case or the best option for Nintendo’s future.  We wish him the absolute best of luck during his tenure as president and hope he will perhaps be the first Nintendo president to make Nintendo technologically competitive on all fronts with its competitors, bringing third party developers back into the fold.  Let’s-a-go!

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.