While Satoru Iwata has been CEO and president of Nintendo since the GameCube, he’s the first member outside of the Yamauchi family to hold the position since Nintendo began its focus on video games. In fact, Iwata started as a programmer for HAL Laboratory before he ever stepped foot into his shoes as an executive at Nintendo.
In a recent interview with 4Gamer, Iwata was asked when the last time he worked as a programming engineer. The surprising answer came during his first years as CEO of Nintendo, working on the Super Smash Bros. Melee release in order to get it ready for shipping. According to him, there were bugs that would have made it impossible to ship the game on time, so he sat down and began helping the team work on them.
At the time, I went to HAL Labs in Yamanashi and was the acting head of debugging. So, I did the code review, fixed some bugs, read the code and fixed more bugs, read the long bug report from Nintendo, figured out where the problem was and got people to fix those…all in all I spent about three weeks like that. And, because of that, the game made it out on time.
And that was the last time that I worked as an engineer ‘in the field’. I was right there, sitting by programmers, in the trenches, reading code together, finding the bugs, and fixing them together.
Iwata acknowledges that his managerial duties to Nintendo have taken him out of the programming game a bit and he’s a bit rusty, but it’s nice to see that even Iwata has helped save the release date of a game thanks to his programming knowledge.
