Nintendo EAD

~ the last words ~

Nintendo EAD was the largest software development division inside Nintendo and the one whose output you can name without being told. It held the Mario and Zelda series, the Donkey Kong games after the arcade original, F-Zero, Star Fox, Pikmin, Animal Crossing and everything with Wii in the title. Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka were credited on every game it ever shipped, with wildly varying degrees of actual involvement, and both had started in the department that preceded it.

That predecessor was the Creative Department, which in the early 1970s was the only place in Nintendo where games were designed at all, staffed by people with art backgrounds because Nintendo was still mostly a toy company. It became the Research & Development Department in 1972 with about twenty employees, then split into R&D1, R&D2 and R&D3. Around 1983 Hiroshi Imanishi oversaw the creation of Research & Development No. 4, a department aimed specifically at games for the Family Computer, with Hiroshi Ikeda, formerly a director at Toei Animation, as its general manager and Miyamoto as chief producer.

In 1989, a year before the Super Famicom shipped in Japan, R&D4 was spun out as a division of its own and named Entertainment Analysis & Development. It ran two departments: software development under Miyamoto, and technology development under Takao Sawano, which built the libraries and tools the other half used. F-Zero was the first game EAD programmed entirely itself. For the Super FX chip that put polygons into Super Famicom cartridges it worked with Argonaut Software.

~ the record ~

~ r&d4 ~

The founding problem was that Ikeda's team had ideas and no way to program them. Mario Bros., one of the department's first games, needed Gunpei Yokoi and R&D1 to get it running. The fix was Toshihiko Nakago, who knew the Famicom chipset because his company, Systems Research and Development, had been hired to build the development kits for it, and whom Miyamoto pulled across from R&D2 to help make Excitebike. Then came a Famicom conversion of the arcade beat 'em up Kung-Fu Master, called Spartan X at home and Kung Fu everywhere else. Then Super Mario Bros., which standardized most of what a platform game is, with The Legend of Zelda developed alongside it and released a year later. What those two sold is what paid for the next generation of hires, among them Hideki Konno, Katsuya Eguchi and Kensuke Tanabe, all of whom became producers themselves.

~ twenty to thirty people a game ~

In 1997 Miyamoto said that a Nintendo EAD title took twenty to thirty of his people over the course of development, and that SRD, by then effectively a company living inside the division, had about two hundred programmers. Those are small numbers for the output. The games that defined a generation of hardware were made by groups you could fit in a lecture room, with the heavy programming contracted out to an outside company that had been doing it since the Famicom development kits.

The structure kept getting bigger around that core. Miyamoto joined Nintendo's board in June 2000 and took responsibility for all software development at the company. A Tokyo branch opened in 2002, specifically because talented people in Tokyo did not want to move to Kyoto, and its first project was Donkey Kong Jungle Beat. The 2004 restructuring moved staff in from R&D1 and R&D2 and installed a layer of producers running their own teams: Eiji Aonuma, Konno, Takao Shimizu, Tadashi Sugiyama and Eguchi. On 18 June 2014 the Kyoto half moved into the new Nintendo Development Center, a building holding more than 1,100 developers from every internal division at once.

~ 16 september 2015 ~

Satoru Iwata died on 11 July 2015. Tatsumi Kimishima took over as president, and on 14 September Nintendo announced a company-wide reorganization effective two days later. EAD was merged with the game development side of Nintendo Software Planning & Development into one division called Entertainment Planning & Development. Shinya Takahashi, who had run SPD, got the new division, with Eguchi and Yoshiaki Koizumi as his deputies. Miyamoto was moved into a role called Creative Fellow, which was invented in the same announcement.

My own route into games was a PC in an internet cafe playing Counter-Strike, which in Turkey in the early 2000s is where games actually were. But geography is the easy half of the distance here. Nintendo EAD was an internal name that appeared nowhere a player could reach it, not on the cartridge and not on the box, so almost everyone who has ever held a controller has played something this division made under a label that existed only in Japanese and only on an org chart in Kyoto.

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