Nintendo CEO dies at 55

The CEO of Nintendo, Saturo Iwata has died of bile duct cancer at the age of 55, the Japaneses video game maker said.

Iwata, who passed away on Sunday, underwent surgery for the disease last year and he had resumed his duties after a brief period of recovery.

Starting out as a programmer in a Nintendo subsidiary in the 1980s, Iwata became president of Nintendo in 2002.

He is a highly revered figure in the Japanese gaming scene and he has since been considered the leading figure behind Nintendo's successful turnaround after he joined the company in the year 2000.

Under his leadership, the company launched its hugely successful Wii and Nintendo DS consoles and he is considered the crucial driver behind the focus on easy-to-use consoles, a move that allowed the company to tap into a much wider audience beyond the traditional gaming community.

Most recently, he led Nintendo into the rapidly growing mobile gaming sector.

Tributes have been coming in on social media with the team at PlayStation tweeting; "Thank you for everything, Mr. Iwata."

Some users have posted collages and touching tributes to the game maker.

His death comes as Nintendo expects to double its annual operating profit based on the long-awaited entry in the rapidly growing smartphone gaming sector to counter weakening sales of its traditional consoles.

The BBC reports Marc Einstein, head of digital media at Frost & Sullivan in Tokyo, paying tribute to Iwata;

 “Iwata was a titan - he certainly will be missed," he said. "He was very much known for being a gamer first and a [chief executive] second - a game changing figure."

"Nintendo is really at a cross roads," Mr Einstein told the BBC. "They were the last company that for a very long time were clinging to the hardware business model of their consoles."

In March this year, Nintendo announced an agreement with mobile gaming company DeNA to start their foray into mobile gaming.

"The successor will most likely be someone internal and it will be crucial whether it will be someone who is serious about that step into mobile gaming."

Nintendo shares dropped 0.7% in early Monday trading.