What's so depressing about this for me is that Iwata was pretty much a living, breathing representation of everything Nintendo stood for as a company.
Thinking back to the Wii and DS eras, both were created because Iwata wanted to create brand new experiences for players that they hadn't experienced before in the face of the growing hardware arms race that he felt wasn't actually doing anything to further the experiences players could have. Whether or not they ended up being what some players wanted (and there certainly were some people who didn't like Nintendo's direction at the time), they became what they were because Iwata wanted to do what he thought was best for games and the people who play them.
Lord knows Iwata and Nintendo could be frustrating in their stubbornness and their inability or refusal to adapt to certain trends. But everything Iwata was about, creating fun games and worlds, developing new experiences for players, and just in general having the time of their lives making whatever they were making, was everything Nintendo was about, and the philosophy that's made so many of my best memories growing up, and have continued to give me countless hours of joy up until this day. And now that he's gone, for the first time, I'm wondering if they're ever going to be quite the same again.
RIP iwata. The industry was better for having you in it.
