First Nintendo code ever written by Satoru Iwata possibly found
Posted on 7 years ago by Zack in General Nintendo, News | 8 Comments
The first piece of Nintendo code ever written by the late Satoru Iwata may have been discovered in the circuit boards of several old Famicom games. The circuit boards were purchased and discovered by Frank Cifaldi, the head of restoration at developer Digital Eclipse. Calling them an “incredible piece of video game history”, Cifaldi went on to explain the importance of these relics. The four boards he purchased belong to the games Hyper Olympic, Stargate, Soccer and Joust. While all are valuable treasures to a game historian, the most noteworthy item is the circuit board for Joust, as it was programmed by a young Iwata in 1983 as part of deal between Nintendo and Atari that never went through, long before he became the president of Nintendo.
What makes the circuit boards especially valuable is the fact that this is “earlier-than-retail” code, possibly being some of the earliest versions of each respective game. Together with the fact that the Joust code was the first piece of code that the president Satoru Iwata ever worked on, and the Joust circuit board likely predating the official release of the game means that Frank Cifaldi has stumbled upon what is possibly the first piece of code ever written by Iwata. You can find the series of tweets detailing the discovery below.
