After spending 45 years at Nintendo, executive and technology fellow Genyo Takeda will retire from the company in June 2017. During his stint at Nintendo Takeda worked on the hardware for a variety of gaming systems and was technically the company’s first game designer.
“From designing the setup for the analogue joystick on the N64’s controller, he was one of the main designers behind the Wii and GameCube hardware. He is also a man after my own heart, as he openly advocated the fact that leaps in graphical power are not necessary to push gaming hardware forward, said Forbes.
Genyo Takeda was born in Osaka, Japan, his one of the biggest contribution at Nintendo was to introduce batteries for the RAM in NES cartridges. As this allowed the save data to survive each time the console was turned off.
Takeda joined Nintendo in 1972. He was promoted to his best-known position when the Integrated Research & Development (IRD) division was founded in 1981. At IRD, he primarily worked on improving hardware for home consoles and handhelds, but sometimes developed video games. In software development, he is notable for creating the Punch-Out!! and StarTropics franchises. He also designed Nintendo’s first arcade game, EVR Race, in 1975.
In September 2015, he was promoted to co-representative director and given the title of Technology Fellow during the company wide executive shuffle following the death of former company president Satoru Iwata. At investor’s meeting recently, Nintendo announced his retirement.
Takeda attended Shizuoka Government University in Honshū, where he studied semiconductors. After his graduation in 1971, he was hired by Nintendo after Takeda responded to a newspaper ad. Takeda worked alongside Masayuki Uemura in Nintendo’s R&D2 team developing ‘an electronic shooting range.’
Takeda who was one of the lead developers on the Wii console will be replaced by Ko Shiota who would take over his role in June 2017.
