Quote as inspiration: “in my heart I’m a gamer”

My fifth day in a row, the writing assignment today in the Blogging University is to base my blog on a quote on Twitter. True to my gamers heart, I decided to search for a quote about gaming. Gamers among us can imagine inspiration struck when I saw this quote again. For the non-gamers reading this blog, let me give you a little background.

The gaming community was shocked in July by the sudden passing op Satoru Iwata, CEO of Nintendo. He had health issues due to cancer, we knew that, but he seemed back on the job and raring to go. And then, just like that, he was gone, aged 54. As a non-gamer you might wonder why this shook the gaming world. Sadly, a lot of people pass away at an early age, and cancer is a terrible disease. But you have to understand the man that Iwata was as president of Nintendo. He wasn’t one of those managers that came to the job just to manage and assert his power. He wasn’t one of those CEO’s that gathered like-minded managers around him, not suffering any other opinion but his own.

Iwata started working as a games developer and worked on many well known game series, made his way to being CEO by knowing all the corners of the company. Under Iwata’s direction, Nintendo developed the DS and the Wii. Consoles that changed the gaming market, appealing to a far wider audience then the hard-core gamers and teenagers that played games before that. Games penetrated into the living room, engaging families and people of all ages. You can even find the Wii in retirement homes, where the elders enjoy a game of bowling in Wii Sports.

This quote that Iwata made in 2006 really says it all. The reason why he was key in making Nintendo to what it is today, key in opening up the fun of gaming to us all, and key in getting Sony and Microsoft do their utmost to try to develop bigger and better with their Playstation and XBox. And above all, it was what makes us gamers miss the fellow gamer he was.