Nintendo legend Takashi Tezuka is retiring after 40 years

Takashi Tezuka, the director of Nintendo classics like Super Mario Bros. 3 and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, will retire from Nintendo this summer, the company confirmed Friday. Tezuka joined Nintendo in 1984, and rapidly rose through the ranks as a graphics designer to game director to, ultimately, executive officer. He’ll retire from Nintendo on June 26, Nintendo revealed in a financial document.

Tezuka started his career at Nintendo designing sprites for the original Punch-Out!! and quickly became an assistant director on the company’s foundational video games. He served as an assistant director alongside Shigeru Miyamoto on titles like Excitebike, Super Mario Bros., and The Legend of Zelda. In some of his earliest games, Tezuka was credited under the nickname “Ten Ten.”

After serving as an assistant director on multiple games and contributing to various game stories, Tezuka took over as the main director on Super Mario Bros. 2, known in the West as Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels. He later directed and designed for games like Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, and Yoshi’s Island. Tezuka is credited with co-creating Yoshi with Shigefumi Hino. Tezuka’s final game credit as a designer is 1996’s Super Mario 64.

Tezuka has since gone on to produce and supervise numerous games in the Super Mario, The Legend of Zelda, Animal Crossing, and Pikmin franchises. Beyond his early work designing and writing stories for Nintendo’s enduring franchises, Tezuka was responsible for shaping early game ideas into popular hits.

In 2014, Tezuka told Polygon that the idea to make Super Mario Maker came about because game designers came to him to express how fun it was to make Super Mario courses with Nintendo’s internal course-making tool.

“They brought the idea to me thinking it would be a great game idea because they had so much fun with [it],” Tezuka said at the time. “There are lots of drawing utilities in the world, but does everybody like drawing? Not necessarily. In order to make a [Mario] course, all you have to do is put different parts together. It’s not as difficult or out of reach as drawing is. Instead of creating another Mario Paint, when I saw this course editor, I was inspired to bring the fun of Mario Paint into this course editor to make something fun and creative for people to enjoy.”

Tezuka was also well-known for thinking globally when it came to designing games.

“In the earlier Mario games, we weren’t really considering worldwide culture or international culture when we created them,” Tezuka told Polygon in a 2015 interview about Super Mario Maker. “But that has been something that we have had to consider more recently. We want our games to be enjoyed and understood worldwide by as many people as possible.”

“I’ll never forget [producer Takashi Tezuka] coming to us and saying, ‘If we’re going to [sell the game outside of Japan], you guys have to change everything,’ because they had designed it so specifically for the Japanese market,’” said Leslie Swan, former localization department head at Nintendo, in publisher Boss Fight’s book about Animal Crossing.

Tezuka was also the go-to guy for certain Mario lore. He was the one who settled an internal debate within the Mario Kart World team, confirming that Mario does indeed eat the mushrooms that give him powers.

Tezuka’s retirement follows the recent departures of other Nintendo veterans, including Hideki Konno (Super Mario Kart, Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island) and Kensuke Tanabe (Super Mario Bros. 2, Metroid Prime), who retired over the last year.