satoru iwata was the only person at nintendo who could write code. in 1999 the pokemon gold and silver dev team came to him with a problem. the game was too big for the game boy cartridge… he rewrote it himself in a week. then because he had room left over, he added the entire kanto region from pokemon red and blue as a bonus second half. nobody had ever done that before. nobody has done it since. in 1994 he had already saved earthbound. nintendo was about to cancel the game. iwata rebuilt the engine in months and salvaged two years of work. he started at hal laboratory as a college student programming balloon fight in his bedroom. by thirty-three he was president of hal, taking over a company near bankrupt and running it back to profit. in 2002 he became the fourth president of nintendo. in 2005 he gave a gdc keynote called heart of a gamer and said the line every developer remembers. on my business card i am a corporate president. in my mind i am a game developer. but in my heart i am a gamer. in 2014 nintendo was bleeding money. western executives would have laid off thousands. iwata took a 50 percent pay cut for five months instead. zero layoffs. that same year he was diagnosed with a bile duct tumor. he had surgery. he returned to work. he kept recording nintendo direct presentations through chemo. he died on july 11 2015. he was fifty-five. the switch launched twenty months later. he never saw it. he never stopped being a gamer. that is why he is the only ceo gamers ever genuinely loved.