Not a celebrity outright, but we lost Satoru Iwata, 4th President (and CEO) of Nintendo. Aged 55
He wasn't simply some corporate bigwig. He was a man who was passionate about gaming, and a whiz programmer. To give you an idea:
"Not just a great CEO, Iwata was also a rockstar of a programmer.
Pokemon Gold/Silver was originally going to ship without Kanto (the Pokemon Red/Blue region) on the cart. Iwata heard about it and, in his spare time, managed to compress the entirety of Gold/Silver down small enough to fit in Kanto, as well. He didn't think it was right to shortchange players when something could be done, so he insisted it go on the cart.
During a weekend, on a whim, he ported the entire Pokemon battle system to the N64 with no reference documents. On Monday, he showed a producer what he had done, and that was the genesis of Pokemon Stadium.
Iwata and Sakurai got it in their heads that a sumo game would be cool. So during the weekends and lunch breaks, they started working on this 2D game where getting knocked out of the ring would cause you to lose a life. Inspired by a screensaver Miyamoto had of Mario fighting Bowser, they tried putting Nintendo characters in the role and developed a prototype of the game without it being greenlit. Miyamoto loved the idea and Super Smash Bros. was born.
When working on Earthbound, development was going badly. The game wasn't being made in a way the programmers could easily make new content. Iwata sat down with Itoi, who didn't have a ton of game development experience, and said "Look, we can keep doing it this way and it will take two more years and the project might get cancelled. Or I can help you start over and it will take six months." Itoi agreed to reboot the project and Iwata got it done in time.
When Iwata was General Manager of Nintendo (a position so high up that his promotion after this was CEO), his friend Sakurai came to him and told him that Smash Bros. Melee wouldn't be ready in time for Christmas. The development guideline was too tight and the code was rather buggy. So Iwata, while still basically running the company, looked over the entire game code himself and fixed whatever problems he saw. Because of him, the game came out on time for Christmas."
He also did a lot of work on the Kirby games, as he worked at HAL before moving directly to Nintendo. You might also know him from his work on Balloon Fight. A great creative force who will be missed.
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