Bon Voyage, Takashi Tezuka, One of the Greatest Game Designers of All Time
Bon Voyage, Takashi Tezuka, One of the Greatest Game Designers of All Time
The man behind Mario, Zelda, and Animal Crossing announces his retirement.
By The LRG Team
These days, it seems that when we say farewell to a legendary games industry figure, it’s with the sad news of their passing. For once, though, an industry great is heading out on his own terms: Nintendo’s Takashi Tezuka has announced his retirement after 42 years of more or less defining the way we think about video games.
We talk about people who shaped the medium, but Tezuka went a step further and rewired our brains. Tall claim? Consider his body of work strictly by noting a small percentage of the games that he personally designed or directed (which were synonymous terms in the ’80s):
- Super Mario Bros.
- Super Mario Bros. 3
- The Legend of Zelda
- Super Mario World
- The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
- The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening
He’s the one who designed those games! He determined or oversaw the level designs, the power-ups, the play mechanics, the way monsters behave! All the cool stuff you love about some of the greatest and most influential games of all time were put into place by Takahashi, or under his direct supervision. Shigeru Miyamoto may be the luminary whom everyone adores, and rightly so: His head has been bursting with inventive game concepts for nearly half a century now. But Tezuka was the guy who took those big ideas and made them into reality. The two have been a team since Tezuka joined Nintendo in 1984 and helped Miyamoto create the trippy bible-slinging maze-action game Devil World. It’s been banger after banger since then.
Tezuka ascended to the role of producer after about a decade in the trenches, but you can still feel his influence on the dozens upon dozens of games that he oversaw. It’s too many to list, unless you’re MobyGames, but here’s the highlight reel:
- Star Fox 64
- The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
- The Mario Golf series
- The Mario Party series
- The Paper Mario series
- Animal Crossing
- The Mario & Luigi series
- The Pikmin series
Just about everyone who has ever worked on a video game would put their involvement in any one of these creations as the highlighted, headlining item on their resume. For Tezuka, those are just... the entire resume. And on top of that, he is by all accounts a genuinely kind and genial person!
For anyone who has a lot of free time to kill, we’d love to see the calculation on how many man-hours of entertainment Tezuka’s creations have brought to the world. If anyone working in games deserves a happy retirement, it’s surely this humble giant.
