Today’s Conversations with Creators features a conversation with Naughty Dog, who you assuredly know brought us legendary games like Uncharted and The Last of Us (which as it turns out is in my top five games of all time).

I’m particularly fond of this episode, because I just loved talking with these guys about a couple of my favorite games, which it turns out were developed by their studio … but I don’t want to talk about that today. Today, I want to talk about Satoru Iwata, who died far too young at 55, this past weekend.

Satoru Iwata’s contributions to the gaming industry have touched every developer, every programmer, every designer, and every publisher. I wanted to take a moment and acknowledge how profoundly he touched my life, without ever knowing that I even existed.

I’ve been playing console video games since the Atari 2600. I’ve been playing handheld video games since Merlin. I grew up in arcades during their golden age, and video games have been part of the fabric of my life for almost as long as I can remember. But it was my NES and my Gameboy that tipped me from a kid who loved games into a kid who lived games.

For those of you who are maybe a little younger than me (probably a lot of you), let me give you a little context. Early consoles had limited graphics capabilities, and while most programmers used that to their advantage, the thing we always wanted was something that would truly let us recreate the arcade experience in our homes. Colecovision did that to some extent, but the NES was flawless. Games like Excitebike, Mario Bros, Donkey Kong, Duck Hunt, and Super Mario Bros. were actually in my house, on my television, exactly like they were in arcades. This was a huge leap for my generation, but then Nintendo and their partners began releasing original NES games that fundamentally changed what console gaming was. Games like Metroid, The Legend of Zelda, Blades of Steel, and R.C. Pro-Am kept me up all night long during many weekends and summer nights, sitting in the CRT glow of my 27” television, fueled by caffeine and the kind of salty snacks that I can’t even think about eating late at night — or at all — now that I’m almost 43.

So … that was a lot more context than I intended, but now that you have it, I hope that you’ll understand why I want to dedicate this episode of Conversations with Creators to Satoru Iwata. It isn’t unreasonable to consider that this episode — and, indeed, the entire series — wouldn’t even exist (at least with me in it) without the contributions Mr. Iwata gave to the industry. I wanted to include a graphic in the episode itself, but we were already locked and that wasn’t possible, so here we are.

I hope you enjoy today’s new episode. Next week, I have a conversation with Trey Arch, where I find out that I like FPS games more than I thought I did, even though I am terrible at them.