Tag: SatoruIwata

8-Bit Show And Tell Revives Satoru Iwata’s VIC-20 Easter Egg

This link’s five years old, and itself came five years after Iwata, beloved programmer president of Nintendo, suddenly passed away. Early in Iwata’s former employer HAL Laboratory’s history, they made games for Commodore 8-bit microcomputers. I myself own a C64 cartridge of HAL’s Pinball Spectacular, a variation upon Namco’s arcade pinball/Breakout mixture Gee Bee. It’s known that Iwata made at least one game for the VIC-20, a Galaxian clone called Star Battle.

It was known that there’s unused text in the cartridge ROM of Star Battle identifying Iwata as its author. Robin of 8-Bit Show And Tell had a look at the code in a monitor (27 minutes), and discovered that there’s a section that would have printed the credit from Iwata and HAL Laboratory to the screen but for the flag that would have triggered its display not being set. A change of a single byte from 0 to 1, and Iwata’s name gets printed to the screen in flashing colors!

While examining the code, Robin discovered a place where it reads the states of the two Shift keys and the Commodore key, and loads a 1 if they’re all pressed at once, but then throws the value away without doing anything with it. He speculates that this was the trigger for the easter egg showing Iwata’s name and HAL Laboratory, but for some reason was removed before release. Robin figured out a way to restore the egg by changing just a few bytes, and lo, in the modified version it works!

I remember the title screen for Pinball Spectacular on the C64 has a credit for HAL Laboratory. Whether Iwata coded it too is, I fear, lost to the ages. But how weird is it that the future president of Nintendo, the interviewer of all those Iwata Asks articles, originator of the Nintendo Directs and long time programmer for HAL got his start coding those little cartridges for Commodore. They just don’t make them like that any more.

Masahiro Sakurai on Satoru Iwata

I haven’t posted much from Kirby and Smash Bros. creator’s prolific Youtube channel on game development. There’s a lot of good information in there. The channel is winding down now after a good run, but now, near the end, he’s posted at one of his final videos a remembrance of his old boss, and beloved Nintendo company president, the late Satoru Iwata. (10 minutes)

It’s now been nearly 10 years since Iwata’s passing, and the outpouring of respect, admiration, and even affection, for him over that time has been remarkable. There’s a sense that we lost an amazing figure. Sakurai is brilliant in many ways, but he calls Iwata the smartest man he’s ever known. He strove to be polite, not to take offense in conflict, and to always act with logic instead of emotion. He helped transition Nintendo from being under the sole control of the Yamaguchi family to the more varied and ingenious company they’re known for being today.

In addition to running the company, Mr. Iwata started out as a programmer a HAL Laboratory. Think of how rare that is for a multi-billion-dollar company. They didn’t hire your standard MBA out off a business school, but put their future in the hands of a former coder. I have no illusions that, in many cases, that could have been disastrous, because programming and management require different skill sets, but Mr. Iwata pulled it off.

Sakurai finishes the video with a story of the last time he saw Iwata alive. He calls Iwata the person in the world who understood him the most. When Iwata wanted to see him, he didn’t delegate it to an assistant but always emailed him directly. It seems that Iwata was a good person who many admired and respected, but to Masahiro Sakurai, he meant something more.

The video isn’t very long, and there’s a sense of finality to it, not just in Sakurai’s memories of Iwata, but of the ending of his Youtube channel. Masahirro Sakurai on Creating Games is such an unusual series: an important and brilliant working game creator telling the world personally of his views as a creator. Such an unusual move! But Iwata created both the Iwata Asks series, and the Nintendo Direct promotional videos, which may have inspired Sakurai’s own series. Both men understand the importance, often neglected I think, of clear communication, both between others and the world.

Thank you, Mr. Sakurai, for what you’ve told us. And thank you, Mr. Iwata, for all your hard work.