A new book chronicling the life and achievements of Nintendo's legendary president, Satoru Iwata!
Latest Updates from Our Project:
10 Years Without Mr. Iwata
8 months ago
– Thu, Jul 10, 2025 at 07:01:52 AM
As I'm writing this, the date in Japan is just about to become July 11, 2025 — meaning it's now been a full decade since Mr. Iwata passed away on July 11, 2015. It's a somber milestone to mark, but I'm also encouraged, because his impact has continued to be felt and acknowledged, even quite recently!
At the end of the final Switch 1 Nintendo Direct presentation a few months ago on March 27, Mr. Miyamoto appeared and honored the history of Nintendo Directs as a whole, saying, "Since 2011, Nintendo Directs have delivered Nintendo news directly to you." While saying this, he performed Mr. Iwata's signature hand gesture, which is something that has not been done in the last decade. (It was replaced, out of respect, with alternate gestures like the Nintendo Switch "snap.") It was a kind moment as Nintendo closed the book on the last chapter of Nintendo's hardware history that Mr. Iwata had an immediate, in-person influence on — he passed away before the Switch 1 launched, but he guided its development behind the scenes in the years before he left us.
I was happy to see that small moment of recognition for Mr. Iwata at the end of the Switch 1 era. But what I didn't expect was that the honor for him would continue into the Switch 2 generation!
A couple of months later on June 3, just two days before the new Switch 2 went on sale around the world, Nintendo posted another video to YouTube that didn't just reference Mr. Iwata with a hand gesture, but instead specifically praised him and gave him the credit for having the vision that led us to Switch 2! It's the video called "Creator’s Voice Special Edition – Nintendo Switch 2’s Custom Processor" featuring Nvidia's Jensen Huang. It's less than three minutes long and well worth your time to watch, as it's packed with praise and speaks so strongly to his lasting legacy, with quotes like, "We lost Iwata-san before the launch, but his clarity, his purpose . . . it still inspires our work every day."
Finally, I'd like to share a YouTube video of my own with you all.
Last August, I was invited to Long Island Retro Gaming Expo to give a talk about Mr. Iwata, and the process of writing The Impact of Iwata. That panel presentation was recorded, and I just posted it to YouTube yesterday for anyone to watch. My apologies for its poor audio quality, though! Apparently the microphone placed on the desk right in front of me failed to record, so the audio captured here was taken in by the video camera placed in the back of the room. Sorry for the crowd noise! Hopefully you can still dial in and understand what I'm saying.
It's hard to believe it's been over 10 years now since Satoru Iwata left us so suddenly. I'm thrilled that his final hardware project, the Switch, defined this last decade of Nintendo history with its incredible success, and that the new Switch 2 is off to an even stronger start. Whether the hundreds of millions of Switch players around the world know it or not, they're enjoying the continued impact of this one amazing man every time they pick up a Joy-Con controller!
~ Lucas M. Thomas
P.S. It seems like I've missed some messages in the Kickstarter inbox here since I posted the last update last October! Sorry for falling so far beyond in responding there. I'll get back to you right away if you've had a pending question there lingering for far too long!
NF Print Issue Opt-In + Mr. Sakurai's Iwata Tribute
over 1 year ago
– Mon, Oct 14, 2024 at 01:19:42 PM
Greetings again, Impact of Iwata backers! I hope you're all doing well here as the Fall season settles in. (At least where I live; it's notably chillier today than it was yesterday!)
--- BONUS NF ISSUE STRETCH GOAL FULFILLMENT ---
This update is all about making good on another of the Stretch Goals we hit during the campaign last year. I had promised to write a "making of" article about the creation of the book and print it in an upcoming issue of Nintendo Force Magazine. I then promised to send that issue to backers who'd pledged at the Print Tier above. My apologies for taking longer than intended to do that!
I originally thought I'd write that article early this year, making it a part of NF #70 or #71. But I got to that point and was still in the thick of working on the Impact of Iwata audiobook, so I didn't feel like the creation process was actually done yet, and decided not to do a "post-mortem" kind of article for a book I was still working on. I decided to bump the article back to an issue later in the year. Now, though, I'm finally ready to write it, and get it out to you all!
"The Making of The Impact of Iwata" will be included in the upcoming 74th issue of Nintendo Force, pictured above. We're in the home stretch of getting this issue assembled, and it'll be going to press at the end of this week in order to be delivered to most mailboxes in the early days of November.
If you would like to receive a copy of this issue in print, you'll need to opt-in: Use the Messages feature here on Kickstarter to contact me and tell me the address to send the issue to. You will have one week from the time this Update goes live on Kickstarter, so the deadline will be at around 4:30 p.m. Eastern on Monday, October 21. (That's when I have to send the final mailing list to our printing company.)
I apologize that that's a little bit of a clunky process. But since it's been so long since we first collected address information to send out the books themselves, many of you have surely moved — or you may have a different address you'd prefer the issue be mailed to anyway. So I don't want to just blindly mail magazines to you all and have hundreds of them potentially disappear into the void or get delivered to some old house where you haven't lived in months.
I also recognize that some people won't see this update in time, and may miss this one-week window of opportunity to opt-in. In those cases, I'll still send a future NF issue to those backers, and we can work that out in the Messages. I just have to set the hard deadline for address submission for this issue in particular, so that its mailing to everyone, including our thousands of existing NF subscribers, isn't held up.
Lastly, if you are one of those existing NF subscribers and would already be receiving this issue anyway, you can choose to have this bonus copy sent to your normal address, or submit a family member's/friend's address to have it mailed to them instead.
--- EXTRA INSIGHTS INTO MR. IWATA FROM MR. SAKURAI! ---
While I've got you here, I also want to direct your attention to a great video just posted a few days ago on Masahiro Sakurai's YouTube channel. Mr. Sakurai has been making great educational videos about the process of game development for the last couple of years, and he's winding down the channel now. But before he closed the book on his era of YouTube content creation, he shared this great video full of his reflections on his relationship with Mr. Satoru Iwata:
It's just under 10 minutes long, and well worth your time to watch. It echoes a lot of the insights I was able to uncover and include in the book, but also has a few new facts! It's wonderful to be able to hear Mr. Sakurai's personal words, too. A lot of these sentiments and stories he's never shared before.
And that's it for now! Thanks again for your ongoing support, and especially to all of you who jumped over and helped us reach the goal for our NES Endings Compendium: Volume 2 Kickstarter, which just wrapped up last week. We'll have another campaign in early 2025! More information on that in a couple of months!
Click on that link to go ahead and hop over to the pre-launch page for NES Endings Compendium: Volume 2! We're in our final stages of preparation to launch its Kickstarter campaign coming up in just five days, on Tuesday, September 10!
Could you help us out by clicking the "Notify me" button on that pre-launch page? It helps with visibility for the campaign! And I'm excited for you all to see more from this second-ever NF Book. It's absolutely packed cover-to-cover with classic NES adventures, from Super Mario Bros. 3 to Castlevania III to Mega Man 3. (Whole lotta "3" games released in 1990.)
--- IMPACT OF IWATA ALBUM VIDEOS ---
Though we're gearing up for fundraising for our next book, content creation for The Impact of Iwata continues!
This past Friday I was a guest on the OverClocked ReMix Twitch channel for a "listening party" for the Impact of Iwata 16-track remix tribute album. We listened to the entire album from start to finish, and took breaks in-between some of the tracks to discuss the creation of the book, the album and more. Here's the VOD in case you missed it and are interested to watch/listen:
Meanwhile, if you'd rather enjoy just the music without me interrupting, OverClocked ReMix has also uploaded the entire album as a single video on their YouTube channel. Just hit play once and you'll hear the whole thing!
Following up on these videos, I plan to start streaming soon to fulfill the promised "Video Series" Stretch Goal from the Impact of Iwata campaign. I just got myself all situated with a new Elgato capture device (my old one kind of gave up the ghost), and I'm looking forward to sitting down and playing a few of Mr. Iwata's games alongside any of you all who'd care to join in. More information on that soon!
Hope you all had a good Labor Day weekend and that September is greeting you well. :)
~ Lucas M. Thomas
Audiobook & OverClocked ReMix Tribute Album Release Day!
over 1 year ago
– Tue, Aug 27, 2024 at 05:55:10 PM
Happy 30th Anniversary to Mother 2! Mr. Iwata's most famously saved game, the SNES RPG that American audiences would come to know as EarthBound, first went on sale in Japan exactly 30 years ago today. Without Mr. Iwata's intervention, that never would've happened! The game probably would've ended up cancelled and totally scrapped!
So today is a more than perfect day to once again celebrate Satoru Iwata's life and lasting legacy, and we're doing so by officially releasing the long-awaited audiobook version of The Impact of Iwata to all of you, our Kickstarter backers!
In addition, the OverClocked ReMix community is launching their Impact of Iwata tribute album, which was composed alongside of and in support of the audiobook. (The visual versions of the book have those great illustrations at the beginning of each chapter, so I wanted to try to capture that same "wow" factor in audio-only form. Music was the answer, and all of the OC ReMix artists did a great job!)
Check out the great trailer the OC ReMix team assembled for just this occasion! The book's chapter intro artwork got a bit of added animation. I didn't expect that! It looks snazzy!
You can check out the full OC ReMix Impact of Iwata tribute album by visiting OCReMix.org — the album will be pushed live for listening there soon, as well as made downloadable in a variety of listening formats. Additionally, I'll also be sending the full 16-track album to backers' emails — it's included in the ZIP file I'm sending, alongside the audiobook itself.
The audiobook is being sent in two forms in that same ZIP file: One folder inside has all of the chapters separated, so you could choose to listen to them one at a time or jump around out of sequence if you like. The other option is the "Complete Audiobook and Album" file, which is one mega-sized MP3 that runs for nearly six hours and contains the whole thing, start to finish, with the book itself trailed by the 16 OC ReMix tracks. Choose that option if you just want to hit Play one time and kick back to listen to the whole story.
I'll be looking into other audiobook formats in the days ahead as well, and I'll endeavor to get the book added to NintendoForceMagazine.com as well as Amazon/Audible for other eager listeners who aren't already getting it sent to their emails. If you're reading this, though, you should be all set to receive it for free — the audiobook's existence was made possible by hitting a Stretch Goal during the campaign, so it was promised as a free bonus to anyone who pledged to any tier. If you were a backer at any level, it's coming your way!
I'll begin to send out the download links via email as soon as I finish writing this update, but please be patient. That's going to be a few thousand emails to send, and sometimes the mass-emailing DropSend service we use balks at mailing lists that are too long. (Also the file delivery email might end up in your Spam folder, so keep an eye out for that if it doesn't pop up in your primary inbox.)
Thank you all for your extra measure of patience with waiting for the audiobook! Creating an audio-only presentation that's nearly six hours long has definitely been a new experience for me, and the process definitely took longer than I originally imagined it would. But I do hope any and all of you who decide to take the time to listen will appreciate what we've all managed to pull together. It was definitely a team effort, including the contributing writers to the visual versions returning to speak their own words aloud; dozens of talented remixing musicians working diligently to make the OC ReMix tracks happen; TSori, the project lead who guided that whole album process; and Zack Parrish, our audio engineer who mastered all the music tracks and worked to make all of my spoken word audio sound as good as possible. Special thanks to them all!
~ Lucas M. Thomas
More from me here very soon! We're just two weeks away from the Kickstarter launch for NES Endings Compendium: Volume 2. That one's coming together well too! I can't wait for you all to see more from it!
Our Next NF Book Hits Kickstarter Soon!
over 1 year ago
– Tue, Aug 20, 2024 at 05:12:20 PM
A second NF Book is on its way soon!
With work wrapping up on The Impact of Iwata audiobook (we're still on track to release it next week), we've been looking forward to what's next for the new NF Books publishing expansion. And we've pinned down our second project: Rey Esteban's NES Endings Compendium: Volume 2, covering all of the NES games released throughout 1990.
If you're a Nintendo Force Magazine subscriber, you can go back just a few issues to NF #68 and read my review of Rey's Volume 1 in the Community section there. I thought it was fantastic, and I gave it a 9.5 score! So I was thrilled when he reached out to me and asked if NF would be willing to take over publishing duties for the series going forward. (Limited Run was his publishing partner for Volume 1.)
We're working on pulling the campaign page together now, as we'll be taking the same approach we did to raise funds to print The Impact of Iwata: running a new Kickstarter! It's set to go live three weeks from today, on September 10, and it will run for one month, ending on October 10.
NES Endings Compendium: Volume 2 is the second entry in a series of books that will ultimately cover every NES game ever made. In the books, author Rey Esteban examines the endings of NES adventures. What's the final boss fight like? What happens after the player achieves victory? Is there a grandiose final cutscene to reward the players' hard work, or does the game end with a boring nothingburger like a basic "Congratulations" message on a black screen? Some endings are iconic. Others are bland beyond belief! The Compendium collects them all.
Volume 1 in the series was published last year by Limited Run and is still available to order from both their website and Amazon, so seek it out first if you want to begin at the beginning. But they weren't going to be able to do Volume 2 (we won't get into the why right now), so we at NF Publishing stepped up to help Rey keep the series going — and we'd love to have your support as we pick up this dropped torch and run with it ourselves!
I'll have more to share as the new Kickstarter launch date approaches, but if you want to go ahead and save the URL, it will be this one:
And one last quick thing I want to point out, since it just happened yesterday: Nintendo posted a "Museum Direct" video to show off the new Nintendo Museum that's opening in Japan in October, and it looks like Mr. Iwata was subtly honored in it!
Shigeru Miyamoto hosted the Direct, and near the end of the video, he stands in front of a painting that says "Nintendo" in beautiful Japanese calligraphy. But does that painting look a little familiar?
Indeed! It appears to be the same painting that Mr. Iwata stood in front of to record Nintendo Direct segments, specifically the E3 2013 Direct presentation. (And maybe others? I need to go back and check the rest.) The painting previously hung on the wall of a large conference room on the seventh floor of Nintendo's headquarters in Kyoto, where Mr. Iwata and Nintendo's executives would hold shareholder meetings.
It looks like the painting has been taken down and relocated to the Nintendo Museum! There's a small plaque on the new wall it's been hung on, too, which hopefully explains the Iwata connection. The text is too small to read in the video, but maybe one of the first visitors to the new Museum in October will be kind enough to take a close-up photo of it so we can all get confirmation of that or not.
