Long before he became President of Nintendo, Iwata was simply a genius programmer with Hal Laboratory, though he went on to larger roles in that particular company too. With no other title was that genius more on show than with the classic SNES RPG, Earthbound. When the game was in development, Iwata was working a dual role of programmer and head of Hal, which meant that he got to keep tabs on the games the rest of the team were making. That's how he discovered that Earthbound looked like it was going to take a little while longer to complete than expected. He approached the development team and told them that if they continued on the path they were on, the game would take at least two years to finalise. However, if they scrapped what they had and started from scratch, it could be finished in six months. Of course, Iwata was never one to simply issue orders and then sit back, as he took over development of the game and weaved his programming magic by developing the map scrolling feature in a single month. Though the game still took a year of development time to complete, the result was a true classic of the genre and a game that Satoru Iwata had an enormous influence on, as he essentially rebuilt it from the ground up. What are your favourite Nintendo games Iwata had a hand in creating or setting in motion? Let us know in the comments!
Lee Price is a writer for 411mania.com and Starburst Magazine, which is published in the UK. He is currently working as a freelance writer. He hopes to one day fund his addiction to video games by writing about video games, and he maintains a sporadically updated blog at leesrandombulls*it.wordpress.com
