Author: Chris Kohler.
Date of Publication: 09.14.15.
Time of Publication: 3:55 am.

Nintendo Names New President, Reorganizes Its Teams

Nintendo president Tatsumi Kimishima speaks to reporters at the Osaka Stock Exchange on September 14, 2015. JIJI PRESS/AFP/Getty Images

Nintendo has a new president: It’s Tatsumi Kimishima, a longtime company executive who was formerly the CEO of its American branch. Most recently, he was the company’s Managing Director.

The announcement follows the untimely death of Nintendo president Satoru Iwata on July 11. But Nintendo didn’t stop there, announcing a “large-scale revision of the organizational structure of the [company]” effective September 16.

Kimishima has rarely if ever spoken or appeared in public on behalf of Nintendo; when he was CEO of Nintendo of America, the division’s president Reggie Fils-Aime was its public face. We should probably expect other Nintendo employees to pick up Iwata’s role as the company’s YouTuber-in-chief, announcing new games via Nintendo Direct video presentations.

Nintendo also announced that its two senior managing directors, Shigeru Miyamoto and Genyo Takeda, will henceforth be known as the company’s “Creative Fellow” and “Technology Fellow,” respectively.

A “Fellow,” reads the announcement, is an “individual selected from among the Representative Directors who has advanced knowledge and extensive experience, and holds the role of providing advice and guidance regarding organizational operations in a specialized area.”

Here’s where it gets interesting, a little bit inside baseball, and a little bit murky: Miyamoto and Takeda were the heads of the Entertainment Analysis & Development division (aka EAD, the division within Nintendo that created Super Mario, Zelda, and Splatoon) and the Integrated Research & Development division.

However, while Miyamoto and Takeda are no longer in those roles, no new heads of those divisions have been named. Instead, Shinya Takahashi, who was the head of another Nintendo game development division called Software Planning & Development, now has the title of General Manager of a new division called “Entertainment Planning & Development.”

It would seem from the language and the job titles that Nintendo plans to merge, or has already merged, several of its game development teams. (WIRED has requested further comment from Nintendo.)

Author: Chris Kohler.
Date of Publication: 09.14.15.
Time of Publication: 6:23 pm.

Nintendo Consolidates Its Game Development Teams

Nintendo’s legendary pair of game development teams in its Kyoto office are now one big organization.

In additional information released subsequent to its naming of Tatsumi Kimishima as its next president, Nintendo has provided more clarification on the large-scale” restructuring of the company’s business and development teams.

Most notably for game players that follow the company closely, its Entertainment Analysis & Development team and the Software Planning & Development teams, which had long operated as separate organizations within the company, would be merged into a new team called Entertainment Planning & Development.

EAD was founded in 1983 with Shigeru Miyamoto, whose game Donkey Kong had been the company’s first huge hit two years prior, at its head. It was known at the time as R&D4—Nintendo’s then-president Hiroshi Yamauchi’s strategy was to establish many different creative teams and have them compete against one another for his approval. EAD was the team that created the Super Mario, Legend of Zelda, Star Fox, and Pikmin series, among others.

SPD was created in 2003 when the R&D1 and R&D2 teams were broken up. It’s where lots of Nintendo’s weirder game projects, like Wario Ware, Metroid, and Rhythm Heaven come from.

Similarly, two other Nintendo teams with similar missions were combined: Integrated Research & Development, which creates Nintendo’s game console hardware, and Nintendo System Development, which creates system-level application software like StreetPass, Miiverse, the eShop, etc. The new team, Platform Technology Development, will “create a structure in which we can more broadly and efficiently conduct technology development necessary for new products and services,” Nintendo said.