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Birth
He was born on December 6, 1959 in Sapporo, Japan. -
High School
He entered at the Hokkaido Sapporo South High School in 1975, he began developing his own games during his junior year. -
His first computer
He got his first computer, a Commodore PET, in 1978. The computer had a CPU similar to the one used on the Nintendo Entertaiment System. -
Tokyo Institute of Technology
He was admitted in the Tokyo Institute of Technology in April 1978, where he graduated in computer science. -
Unpaid intern at Commodore Japan
He worked at Commodore Japan as a unpaid intern, assisting the head engineer Yash Terakura with technical and software development tasks. His reason to take the job was to spend more time around the computers. Terakura would later serve as mentor to Iwata. -
Seibu Department Store
He would frequently show off his games to the Seibu department store's computer department, and by 1980 a group of employees there invited him to join their company, HAL Laboratory, Inc. -
HAL Laboratory, Inc.
He worked for HAL Laboratory as a part-time programmer in 1980. Iwata and members of HAL made games that were rip-offs form Rally-X and Galaxian form Namco. Despite this Hal stablished a license with Namco for developing games. -
Iwata at HAL
When he graduated form the university in 1982 he joined the company in a full-time capacity. His family did not approve his career choice, and his father did not talk with him for six months after Iwata joined HAL. -
Nintendo joins the battle
In 1983 iwata became the company's coordinator of software production, during this time HAL created a relationship with Nintendo, so they could produce games for its newly released Nintendo Entertaiment System. -
His firsts games on the NES
The firsts games he worked on were Balloon Fight, Earthbound, and the Kirby games. -
NES Open Tournament Golf
When he was contacted by Nintendo to develop the NES Open Tournament Golf, due to the large ammount of data Iwata had to create his own data compression method in order to fit all 18 courses into the game. -
President of HAL
With the company in the edge of bankruptcy, Iwata was promoted to president of HAL in 1993 at the insistence of the Nintendo´s then-president Hiroshi Yamauchi. With the assitance of Nintendo they paid the debt. -
Developing of Pokemon games
Iwata assisted in the developing of Pokemon Gold and Silver, which were released in Nintendo Game Boy Color in 1999, by creating a set of compression tools utilized for graphics in the games. He also helped in Pokemon Stadium for the Nintendo 64 by porting the battle system used in Pokemon Red and Green. -
Early years with Nintendo
In 2000, Iwata took a position at Nintendo as the head of its corporate planning division and took a seat on the board of directors. Nintendo saw a profit increases of 20 and 41 percent during the firsts two years of Iwata at the company. -
Reignin in Nintendo
Iwata was the fourth president of Nintendo, when Yamauchi the company´s president since 1949 retired on May 24, 2002. And he was the first Nintendo president unrelated with the Yamauchi family through blood or marriage since its founding in 1889. -
The WII
Iwata publicly revealed the Wii at E3 2005, holding it above his head to emphasize its small size and light weight design. Reveal of the Wii's signature Wii Remote controller was withheld until the Tokyo Game Show in September 2005. -
E3 2014
On June 5, 2014, Nintendo announced that Iwata would not attend E3 2014 due to medical problems. Iwata issued a public message to shareholders on June 24 that he had undergone surgery the previous week to remove a tumor in his bile duct discovered during a routine physical examination. -
Nintendo Direct
Iwata issued a public message to shareholders on June 24 that he had undergone surgery the previous week to remove a tumor in his bile duct discovered during a routine physical examination.
He appeared to take this in stride and updated his own Mii, avatars used in Nintendo hardware, in June 2015 to reflect his slimmer self. -
Death
He died due to complications from the tumor on July 11 at the age of 55. Nintendo announced his death the following day. Nintendo's regional offices took a day of silence on July 13 across all of its social media accounts in remembrance of Iwata.
