RIP Nintendo's Satoru Iwata, the video game president who was actually a gamer

The world of video games is mourning a huge loss this morning with 55-year-old Nintendo president Satoru Iwata having passed away as the result of a bile duct tumor. While the lasting impact and legacy of Iwata's influence on Nintendo will be thoroughly debated and analyzed, one thing that has no dispute is that Iwata was the rare senior executive in a powerful video game company who was actually a true gamer through and through.

The CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment, the entity in charge of all things PlayStation, is Andrew House. While House has a storied history within Sony's video game division, his entire career has been spent in advertising and communications.

Phil Spencer is Microsoft's "head of Xbox," and brought with him a lot of technical expertise, but mostly focused on project management and other 'corporate' positions that relied more on toting the company line than requiring real, unabashed imagination.

Iwata's history was refreshingly different. He entered the ranks as a freelance video game developer. He was directly hands-on with games in the Kirby and Pokemon franchises, and helped create the defining title Super Smash Bros. He understood the Nintendo business not because of what suit-and-tie people told him in everyday corporate meetings but because he was on the ground floor actually creating the content that defined Nintendo.

He became president of the company in 2002, a mere two years after becoming an official part of the Nintendo team. It was at a time when the company was in one of its worst slumps, following the disappointing reception to its Gamecube system. Under Iwata's leadership, the very unique Wii home console and DS handheld were released to extreme fanfare and excitement. These new systems gave a historic injection of new blood into Nintendo, causing the company's stock price to nearly double in 2006.

Even as he completed his transition from faceless game developer to high-ranking corporate leader, Iwata continued to show his roots as a developer and his unmistakable classification as a gamer. He introduced video segments and other content, available on Nintendo.com as well as through video streaming on Nintendo devices, where he discussed and had conversations with other game creators and developers -- the kind of stuff that the other big players relegate to their inexperienced social media teams and the like.

Unfortunately for Iwata and Nintendo, however, the remarkable success of the Wii and DS turned out to be a one-time thing, as the company has struggled to strike gold again. In recent years, Nintendo's presence has declined even though it continues to capture the attention of its very passionate and loyal fan base.

The unfortunate reality for Nintendo is that the video game environment is wildly different today than it was in 2002, when Iwata took the reigns. It is no longer good enough to be a passionate gamer. The "if you build it, they will come" mantra no longer applies to console gaming giants, as competition from mobile devices and other venues (social networks, etc) has ramped up.

Iwata majored in computer science. He was never a master of the corporate spin and never wasted his time figuring out what company talking points and buzzwords would sound the best. That was a major differentiating factor and something that allowed Nintendo to shine back in the early 2000s.

The industry has a different face today, though -- one that is hyper sensitive to several other industries and much more quickly-changing trends. As a result, it is a very real possibility that Nintendo will replace Iwata not with another passionate game developer, but with someone more ensconced in the business side of things -- someone who will more readily accept the changing tide of the market today and who will be able to manipulate that in Nintendo's favor.

But the discussion as to who will replace Iwata is something that can wait for another day. Today, the story is about Iwata's legacy and about how his vision and perspective truly molded Nintendo into what it has become over the past several years -- the good and the bad. And even though there have been some failures, they were never out of corporate greed or a lack of imagination, and that's not something many high-powered company presidents can say.