Satoru Iwata

In July 2015, the gaming community took to social media to pay tribute to a man only known to the Nintendo fandom and community. The man was Satoru Iwata, the 4th president of Nintendo. He directed Nintendo to produce the Nintendo Wii and the Nintendo DS (meaning Nintendo Dual Screen or Nintendo Developers' Screen) and introduced the Nintendo Directs which are held occasionally to this day and was a much beloved personality (next to the likes of Reggie Fils Aime, Mashahiro Sakurai and Shigeru Miyamoto) in Nintendo's 130+ history as with the Nintendo Directs, Satoru incorporated his sense of humour into any Direct he was in like staring at bananas he was holding in a video pre-recorded for E3 2012 before looking into the camera at the viewer. In 2012, the Wii was given a successor called the Wii U but it failed as did the Nintendo 3DS the year prior.

Satoru Iwata took full responsibly and saved Nintendo employees' careers by slashing his own salary in half. Salary is money that a person earns each month or year from their employer. This wouldn't be the only time that Satoru saved a video game company. Before joining Nintendo, Satoru was working at HAL Laboratories when the company was on the verge of bankruptcy. Those who knew him (including his predecessor in regards to the role of Nintendo's president Hiroshi Yamauchi) trusted him with saving HAL and he was promoted to president of HAL Laboratories. Satoru was only 32 at the time and was 42 when he became Nintendo's president. When Iwata succumbed to bile duct cancer on 11 July 2015, everyone in the gaming community including Sonic the Hedgehog co-creator Yuji Naka paid tribute to a man who was corporate president on his business card, a game developer in his mind and a gamer in his heart.