Iwata became the company's coordinator of software production in 1983. While he was coordinator, he helped HAL make a relationship with Nintendo so they would be able to makee games for the Nintendo Entertainment System. He went to Kyoto himself to ask for permission to work on games for the NES. Nintendo said yes. His first published game was "Joust" for the NES—a port of the 1982 arcade game. Other video games he worked on were "Balloon Fight", "NES Open Tournament Golf", "EarthBound", and the "Kirby" games. Nintendo contacted other developers to make "Open Tournament Golf"; however, all of them did not want to as they did not believe the large amount of data could be kept in an NES cartridge. Iwata said he could develop the game. It was very difficult for Iwata; he had to create his own data compression method in order to fit all 18 golf courses into the game. HHAL had to make parallax scrolling for "F-1 Race" because the NES hardware did not support it.