The Kat Take: This is My Favorite Satoru Iwata Memory

On July 11, 2015 – exactly 10 years ago – the world lost Satoru Iwata.

Nintendo announced the news in one of its characteristically stark press releases, saying only that it “deeply regrets to announce that President Satoru Iwata passed away on July 11, 2015 due to a bile duct growth.” But Nintendo’s unsentimental reaction belied the impact his death had on the company. When I think of what Iwata meant to Nintendo, I think of Masahiro Sakurai’s deeply touching tribute to his friend and colleague and their final meeting.

“He was full of virtue, relentlessly hardworking, committed to service, and a man who changed the game industry. If I hadn’t meant Mr. Iwata at the start of my career, I’d probably be off doing something completely different,” Sakurai said.

To mark the occasion, I’d like to share one of my own favorite Satoru Iwata moments in this week’s issue of Nintenkats. I’ll also be recapping some of the most interesting Donkey Kong Bananza interviews and the rest of the biggest news from this week in Nintendo. Here we go!

If you like Nintenkats please consider upgrading your subscription and supporting the newsletter! I’m an independent journalist trying to make this a regular staple of Nintendo coverage, but I can’t do it without your help. If I can reach $3000 per month in revenue, I’ll start a Nintendo podcast to go along with this newsletter! In the meantime, check out some amazing Nintenkats merch!

The Kat Take: When Mr. Iwata played Balloon Fight

For more than 20 years now, comedian Shinya Arino has been hosting a retro gaming show in Japan called Game Center CX. It’s mainly a variety show in which Arino hilariously struggles to complete various retro games, interspersed with bits where he visits arcades, eats food, and generally experiences Japan. Its biggest contribution, though, are the frank and fascinating interviews he conducts with Hideo Kojima, Satoshi Tajiri, Yuji Horii, and many others, often when they’re in the midst of making some of their best-known games.

They’re all worth watching in their own right – I don’t want to directly link the archive lest it get taken down – but my favorite of them is a 15 minute mini-episode released exclusively to the Nintendo eShop in which Iwata talks about some of his earliest Nintendo memories. The video is filled with exchanges like this one:

Iwata finishes by playing Balloon Fight, one of his earliest games, and is clearly disappointed when he’s only able to snag 14 balloons. I’ve interviewed a lot of gaming executives in my time, and it’s always obvious when they don’t care about games any longer. In that moment of frustration, it’s apparent that Iwata – for everything he accomplished in his career – really cared about doing well in a fiddly Famicom game that he programmed in 1984.

Nintendo is a very different company now than when Iwata passed. Where Iwata was endlessly fascinated by the type of unique interactive experiences that powered the Wii, the DS, and eventually, the Switch, Shuntaro Furukawa is more focused on Nintendo’s characters and history. Nintendo’s profits have reached new heights under his stewardship, but there are times where I wonder if it hasn’t lost a little piece of its soul. Certainly, we’ll never get anything as wonderful as this skit again.

But it’s worth remembering what drew Iwata – and so many others – to games in the first place, which Arino eloquently captured in his own tribute to the man he called The President.

“Today’s a day for playing lots of games together as a family until you can play no more, only to do it all over again tomorrow. And as we do that, those games will light up our rooms,” Arino wrote. “That’s how it should be, we can’t keep them in the dark because in my mind, more than anything, that’s what games are all about: keeping the house lit up.”

More Nintendo Reading: Donkey Kong Bananza’s developer revealed, new previews, and more

• But seriously though, watch Game Center CX: Game Center CX is about Japanese retro nostalgia from the 1980s, but it’s now been around for so long that it’s like a time machine of its own. Among other things, Arino meets both Kojima and Koji Igarashi when they’re both still at Konami; he plays Pokémon Fire Red with Satoshi Tajiri, and he interviews one of the most infamous Korean Starcraft pros of all time before his downfall. It was my big comfort watch during the COVID-19 pandemic, and I still return to it from time to time.

• Sakurai pays tribute to Iwata: Masahiro Sakurai took to social media to once again pay tribute to Iwata, among other things observing that he’s catching up to his friend’s age. He also offered a very brief update on the new Kirby Air Riders, saying it’s “shaping up to be something great!”

• Lots more Donkey Kong Bananza info: Donkey Kong Bananza interviews appeared on Rolling Stone, IGN, and The Verge earlier this week, with among other things reveal that it began life as a Switch 1 game (not surprising, perhaps, but still surprising). We also know now that its director is Kazuya Takahashi, who joined Nintendo from Square Enix in 2020, with Mario Odyssey director Kenta Motokura serving as a producer.

• “This is a piss poor excuse for a controller:” Fixit tore down the Switch 2 Pro Controller. It’s verdict was brutal. You can watch the full video below.

• Where is Kat this week? It’s been a surprisingly quiet week as I recover from jetting off to the UK, but the next two weeks are stacked. I’ll be on Game Mess Mornings with Jeff Grubb on Monday, then I’m flying down to Irvine for a two-day project, then it’s time for San Diego Comic-Con, where I’ll be producing a show for Restart.run. Don’t worry, there won’t be any interruptions in the newsletter, but I’ll probably be putting them out a bit earlier in the week. The next issue should coincide with the reviews dropping for Donkey Kong Bananza.

Submit to the Mailbag!

One of the perks of being a premium subscriber is that you get to submit questions to the weekly mailbag via the comment section in each issue. We don’t have a question this week, but please contribute your questions in the comment section and I’ll go through them in the next issue, which will probably be on Wednesday.

Thanks for reading another issue of Nintenkats! We’ll be back with more Nintendo news, opinions, and mailbag questions next week!