History.

Nintendo president Satoru Iwata passed away last year at the age of 55. Beloved by gamers and responsible for seeing the company through one of its most successful periods, Iwata started out as a developer in the early 1980s, joining HAL Laboratory and collaborating closely with Nintendo on Famicom titles.

It would seem that Iwata's first piece of professional coding - or one of his first pieces, at least - has been discovered. Digital Eclipse's Frank Cifaldi - a former games journalist who has a keen interest in locating lost games and preserving them for future generations - has come across four Famicom development boards, one of which holds the Nintendo version of Joust.

Cifaldi does an excellent job of explaining the story in his tweets, so we'll pass the mic over to him:

Assuming this is the real deal, then this is quite an important piece of video game history - even more so in the light of Iwata's tragic passing. It's thanks to people like Cifaldi that these items are discovered and properly preserved - otherwise, they would be lost forever.

[source polygon.com]