Nono's place

As some of you may know, I am trying to become a game developer. Or well, mostly game programmer nowadays since I’m not exactly the most creative person. This is not a choice I made later on in life, during some job quiz in high school.

I’ve played videogames all my life. I grew up with a SNES, spending as much time with games as I could after entering school since I was bullied. Very early on I proudly exclaimed I wanted to make videogames at Nintendo, despite not knowing anything about how this process works. Mind you, I was 5 years old or younger when saying this.

When I was 6 or 7, knowing how to read, I started reading gaming magazines. At 8 years old I found out about Zelda games, first having rented Majora’s Mask at a local clothing store that happened to have a wall of N64 games and a N64 there to entertain the kids. This would later grow to be almost an obsession with Zelda, and despite my age I learned the names of the creator, Miyamoto, and reading more about him also learned stuff about company CEO Iwata.

Even now I occasionally tell people who ask what made me want to become a programmer parts of this story. My mother, if she’s around, always jokes about how I’d say I would one day work at Nintendo with “Shimimoto and Iwada“ since she always forgets their names.

I guess that’s why I spent at least 2 hours today pretty much crying my eyes out. It had been a kids’ dream to at least meet the man I learned to be one of the best programmers ever, a man to whom the fun of videogames was serious business because at heart he always remained a bit childish himself. A fact that he himself was proud of.

I have actually not been doing terribly well at college lately. Depression makes it hard to get myself to work. At times I felt stupid for chasing such a stupid dream from an autistic, daydreaming kid. Today is not such a day. I feel reinvigorated, reading and remembering things Iwata-san said and did in the past, his love for gaming and his company. I feel I want to make him proud, even if he never knew of me and never will.

We lost a great man today.