Passed away unexpectedly at age 55, due to a bowel duct growth

We have lost a pioneer in the gaming industry. He revolutionized Nintendo during his time as president. I never even suspected he was ill, he hid his pain so well during Nintendo Directs.

Iwata-san became the 4th president of Nintendo in 2000, and helped develop memorable games, home consoles and portable gaming systems, including the revolutionary Nintendo DS and highly-successful Nintendo Wii.

May we all cast aside the console war and each take a moment to remember an amazing inventor and innovator of gaming.

Seeing this on my feed super messed me up, to be honest. I never knew that he was ill either, and then all of a sudden Nintendo released the statement saying that he'd passed away!

It's really upsetting (and I can't lie, I'm kind of curious about what will come in the next few years...)

What?! So unexpected :(

Forget to ping

What?! So unexpected :(

It's incredibly sad.

This is so sad....I am worried about the future of Nintendo now. I feel like we need to release some new tribute items or have a mini event or something. Nintendo has been with me ever since the NES days....(i had to blow the cartridges a million times to get them to work...) and ive been faithful to Nintendo through all the consoles. And I will always be faithful to Nintendo. I hope they keep on going. :(

I am sad about this news. It's just so sudden...

I was so sad when I heard this. He was such a wonderful person, and I'm still trying to wrap my head around the fact that he's gone. He always put on such a brave face for everyone.

May he rest in peace. 💔

I heard about this less than half an hour after Nintendo of Japan's initial announcement of his death. To say it was a massive shock would... be a pretty big understatement.

I remember that Iwata wasn't at last year's E3 due to going into surgery for a bile duct tumor, and that he'd lost weight, but it seemed like he was on the path to recovery this year. Looks like he wasn't the case after all. 😔

Nintendo's games were pretty much my childhood, and many of the games Iwata was involved with (list here, for those curious. It's long!) are among my favorites. The man was an absolute genius programmer, too; he's the one who managed to compress Pokemon Gold and Silver enough to be able to include Kanto as post-game content, he ported Pokemon Stadium's code to the Nintendo 64 himself (which was notoriously difficult to do), he reprogrammed Earthbound from scratch when the game was facing serious programming issues, he did an incredible amount of debugging work on Super Smash Bros. Melee to get it fixed up for release in three weeks when it looked like it was gonna miss its launch date, he disassembled Commodore computer programs in his youth just by writing him down... the list goes on.

Iwata's always been an immense inspiration, between his talents and all the work he put into trying new things and actually interacting directly with the company's userbase. May he rest in peace - he's definitely earned it.

(As a little food for thought: one of the retro games they played during the Nintendo World Championship last month was Balloon Fight, which he programmed. In hindsight, maybe the inclusion of that particular game was a tribute to him?)

So many interesting stories and anecdotes coming out. I've been crying on and off most of the afternoon, since my twitter feed exploded right after word came out.

i learned of him passing this morning when i booted up splatoon and saw the miiverse posts; for the first time in months, i was on the verge of tears. nintendo games made my middle school years bearable. when i was alone and scared and didn't want to go on with life, they made me smile. nintendo has and will always have a special place in my heart.

i almost feel as if i lost a dear friend, really.

I found out about the news through a Youtube gaming channel I'm subscribed to. Saw the video in my feed and my heart sank in disbelief.

He was the man who helped Nintendo back on its feet by creating the DS and Wii, two very successful systems. He truly gave other game companies a run for their money.

Rest his soul. He gave my generation joy and smiles that will last a lifetime.

RIP, kinda feels like Steve Jobs again.

I wondered why my DS had tears coming out of it this morning. :(

This was truly very sad. :(