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Satoru Iwata, Head of Nintendo, Has Died At 55
An anonymous reader with the news, announced with a statement released by Nintendo on their homepage, that
Nintendo president and CEO Satoru Iwata
died of a bile duct growth on the 11th of July, 2015. The news is noted by Kotaku and by Engadget. Wikipedia notes that Iwata was the first of the company's presidents to be unrelated to the Yamauchi family through blood or marriage.
Cancer is hardly something you "cure". You fight it off, with a painful treatment, in the hopes your body outlives the cancer. Then you keep an eye on it, until it pops back up; rinse and repeat.
It's entirely possible that at the time he already had a terminal case, and the surgery (and the clear weight loss, possibly due to chemo therapy) only gave him a few more months. And we never heard about it because either he didn't want Nintendo's stocks to be affected by an uncertain future, or maybe he just considered it as his own burden to carry (Japanese culture and all.)
No doubt Miyamoto will be under pressure to take the position, shoes, since they both shared the same views about the company's direction. Iwata backtracked a lot with the NX hardware and the DeNA partnership, that was probably a sign he knew he didn't have much time left, and just wanted to try something radical before passing away. I wonder if the next CEO will keep this direction.