Submit a news tip



Genyo Takeda

The 21st D.I.C.E. Awards were hosted earlier tonight, and it included a special honor for Nintendo’s Genyo Takeda, who spent 45 years with the company. Takeda was presented with the show’s seventh Lifetime Achievement Award. The full presentation, including Takeda’s speech, can be seen below.

As for the other awards, many Nintendo-related titles were selected across various categories. The big winner was Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which received a total of four selections, including Game of the Year.

Continue on below for the full lineup of winners.

Genyo Takeda will be receiving special honors at the DICE Awards in Las Vegas next month. The Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences has confirmed that Takeda will be presented with a Lifetime Achievement award.

Takeda spent over 40 years at Nintendo, having joined the company in 1972. He was the company’s co-representative director and “Technology Fellow” towards the end of his career. While he’s now retired, Takeda currently currently serves as a Special Corporate Adviser.

Takeda played a role in the development of games such as Punch-Out!! and StarTropics, but will ultimately be remembered for his role with hardware. He and his team created the Nintendo 64, GameCube, Wii, and Wii U.

Source

This information comes from Nintendo president Tatsumi Kimishima, as stated during the company’s financial results briefing Q&A…

“Takeda expressed interest in retiring and passing the torch when his term of office expires this period. Takeda’s guidance has fostered many technicians over the years, particularly in the technical development departments. Ko Shiota, who we have mentioned as a candidate for the new director, was one of those Takeda mentored while developing our business.

Even after his retirement, we hope to continue seeking advice from Takeda as Special Corporate Adviser such as in terms of how we should look into new technology and play. Takeda’s knowledge, experience and personal connections cannot be easily transferred. We plan to take over those over time in consulting with him. We hope to progress to the next stage by combining Takeda’s advice and support (as Special Corporate Adviser) with the new skills of our young employees.”

Source

Genyo Takeda has been working at Nintendo since the early 1970s. Sadly, his time with the company is coming to an end. A document included with Nintendo’s latest financial results confirms that he’s retiring.

Takeda was most recently assigned the role of Representative Director and “Technology Fellow” in 2015. He has largely worked on the hardware side of things at Nintendo, but was the director and producer of several titles such as Punch-Out!! and Pilotwings 64.

Ko Shiota should be taking over Takeda’s role. This should all be made official following the 77th Annual General Meeting of Shareholders on June 29.

Source

At the Q&A session at Nintendo’s latest Corporate Management Policy Briefing, one of the questions was about Nintendo’s internal development structure, the development team that handles the smart device games and Nintendo’s hiring process. The question was answered by company president Tatsumi Kimishima, Shigeru Miyamoto (Director, Creative Fellow) and Genyo Takeda (Director, Technology Fellow).

Q: I would like to hear more about the current and future direction of your development structure, which is widely considered to be your greatest competitive strength. Do you plan to maintain the current scale for the mid- to long-term, or will you expand it? How will you expand the smart-device team within the larger development structure? My assumption is that there are currently fewer than 100 people on this team, do you think that is sufficient? Also, what sort of employees are needed to help Nintendo grow and evolve in the future, and how do you plan to develop these employees?

A: Kimishima:

Our overall development staff has increased over the past year, but that does not mean it will necessarily continue to increase. In the entertainment industry, it is very common to take the approach of hiring employees who already have experience and technical knowledge in needed areas, in addition to developing new technology and ideas within the company. Going forward, we would like to increase the number of employees who already have some technical ability and who have fun ideas that can inspire new game experiences. These are the kind of people we see as necessary in our field of development. For smart devices, we have been developing using one of our most important IPs, Mario, so instead of using a team that had no prior experience with Mario, we had developers who worked on past Mario games join the development of Super Mario Run. The scale of the team we currently have working on apps is not as large as you
surmise. In the future, while we will plan the course of development, we may not necessarily allocate exclusively internal development resources. We would like to continue cooperating with external partners who understand Nintendo well when the situation calls for it.

Head past the break for Miyamoto’s and Takeda’s take on the subject:

Nintendo has just published a translated transcript of the Q&A session at their latest Corporate Management Policy Briefing.

The following question is about Nintendo’s third party relations regarding the Switch, how Nintendo’s own internal development teams are handling it and Nintendo partnering up with NVIDIA. The question was answered by Shinya Takashi (Director, Managing Executive Officer, General Manager of Nintendo’s Entertainment Planning and Development Division), Shigeru Miyamoto (Director, Creative Fellow) and Genyo Takeda (Director, Technology Fellow).

Q: I believe that inadequate third-party support for the platform (and the lack of compatible software as a result) was the big issue for Wii U. Mr. Takeda just mentioned that Nintendo Switch is a high-performance system. From that viewpoint, I would like to know how third-party publishers are viewing Nintendo Switch. Also, how are Nintendo?s internal developers appreciating Nintendo Switch and what kind of development direction are they taking in creating software for it? Also, what has technically been done for the system in order to realize the high performance of GeForce while managing the power consumption?

Today, Nintendo appointed Tatsumi Kimishima as its new president. We now have some quotes from Kimishima himself, via Japanese paper The Nikkei and Dr. Serkan Toto on Twitter.

Kimishima said that there won’t be changes to the basic strategy set up by former president Satoru Iwata. The challenge, according to Kimishima, now lies in identifying new projects and cultivating the right human resources to reach Nintendo-like profits again.

The Nikkei also quotes representative director Genyo Takeda as saying that the aim is to establish a future-proof group leadership system inside Nintendo.

Source 2 3

Genyo Takeda. Nintendo’s senior managing director and current co-representative director, delivered a memorial address for Satoru Iwata during funeral services held this week. Nintendo has since released the transcript in full. We’ve posted it below.

As we gather here today for a joint funeral with Nintendo Co., Ltd. and Mr. Iwata’s family, I would like to share my heartfelt condolences. President Iwata, allow me to call you Iwata-san, just as I always used to.

Iwata-san, you left us far too soon. Having just chaired our shareholders’ meeting the other day on June 26, the news of your sudden death has left all the employees overcome with a deep sorrow. The late Yamauchi-san passed the baton to you in naming you the president of Nintendo in 2002, and the two Senior Managing Directors of the company, Shigeru Miyamoto and I, have been assisting and working alongside you. Being rather short-tempered myself, the thing that I am most deeply struck by is that you were a true leader in every sense of the word, overflowing with compassion for people. You always maintained a two-way dialogue, even with the next generation of employees, or with much younger members of the development and marketing teams, or with employees outside of Japan whose different customs and cultures can make communication challenging — sometimes even admitting your own mistakes to them. You demonstrated this through your belief that people could eventually come to understand one another, and your strong conviction that the best way for us to grow is through patient communication, even if it took several times, a dozen times or even seemingly endless discussion.

Last week Nintendo held their 75th Annual General Meeting of Shareholders. No major news came out of it and the election of the company’s 10 Directors was no surprise either as all 10 current Directors were re-elected. Today, Nintendo released some supplementary info about the meeting, including the exact numbers of said vote. Compared to last year’s vote, approval ratings are higher across the board, especially for Genyo Takeda and Shigeru Miyamoto. Looks like shareholders were pleased with Nintendo’s performance this past year, which isn’t a huge surprise given that the company had a profitable fiscal year. Check out the approval ratings below (last year’s numbers in parentheses):

– Satoru Iwata: 83.45% (80.64%)
– Genyo Takeda: 92.07% (86.80%)
– Shigeru Miyamoto: 92.08% (86.81%)
– Tatsumi Kimishima: 92.60% (89.11%)
– Shigeyuki Takahashi: 94.46% (93.32%)
– Satoshi Yamato: 94.46% (93.33%)
– Susumu Tanaka: 94.46% (93.33%)
– Shinya Takahashi: 94.46% (93.33%)
– Hirokazu Shinshi: 94.46% (93.33%)
– Naoki Mizutani: 94.52% (94.03%)

Source

One person who attended Nintendo’s financial results briefing last week said that the company has been releasing games at a slower pace. The same person also inquired about development costs and Nintendo’s plans for architectural integration of future home console and handheld video game hardware. There’s a ton to check out here, so head past the break for responses from Satoru Iwata and Genyo Takeda.


Manage Cookie Settings