I've had hours to cope with this and a part of me is still in denial. I see pictures of him all over the Internet, as youthful and bright as we remember, and I can't help exclaiming, "I can't believe he's gone."
I just wandered over to the piano and played "Smiles and Tears" by heart for the first time in, gosh, I don't know how long. EarthBound was one of the games that brought be back to the Nintendo fold in the early 2000s after nearly a decade away, just as Iwata was taking over, and it was also arguably the game most influential in drawing me into the world of interpreting video game music.
Back then, of course, I didn't have a clue about Iwata's level of involvement in the programming. I think it was only with the growth of access to big presentations like the E3 conferences in the 2000s that the major industry bosses cultivated a sense of personality, and we began to pay attention to who they were.
The more I think about it, the fellow that Iwata reminds me of is actually Bill Gates. Now, Microsoft's practices when they were king were somewhat predatory and not at all endearing like Nintendo's, and they never had the same underdog appeal, so the public never saw this side of Gates until after he stepped down to be a philanthropist full-time. But if you were in the tech conference circuit back in the late '90s you would know that Gates was cut from a similar cloth: a somewhat dorky executive who coded his way up in an industry run largely by sales-and-marketing suits, and who never hesitated to poke fun at his own quirks in comedic video segments not that far removed from Iwata's warm self-parody.
Of course, what made Iwata special was not just his gentle humour but the resolve to stick to his vision instead of reacting to what the market thought it wanted. He never forgot who he was or what he stood far, and I am more than a little livid that he never received the quiet retirement he deserved, where he could see all of his initiatives for the company's future come to fruition.