Takashi Tezuka: Difference between revisions

=== 2010s ===

=== 2010s ===

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Takashi Tezuka (手塚 卓志, Tezuka Takashi; born November 17, 1960; also known as “TENTEN” (てんてん)[1]) is a Japanese video game designer and gaming company executive. Since 1984, he has directed, produced, or supervised development of numerous games released by Nintendo. He is now executive officer of Nintendo’s board of directors, and senior officer of its Entertainment Planning & Development division.

With Shigeru Miyamoto, Tezuka designed the platformer Super Mario Bros. (1985) for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). The game was incredibly innovative and influential to the medium. It began the Super Mario game series, and revived the North American gaming industry after it suffered a recession in 1983. Tezuka’s “legendary” creative partnership with Miyamoto has continued since. They soon co-designed the action-adventure game The Legend of Zelda (1986), which began the Zelda franchise.

Working on Super Mario Bros. 3 (1988) for the NES and Super Mario World (1991) for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), Tezuka came up with the Boo species of ghosts and the dinosaur Yoshi which became staples of the Mario franchise. He then worked on The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (1991) and Yoshi’s Island (1995) for the SNES, and Super Mario 64 (1996) for the Nintendo 64. Later, Tezuka began serving in more managerial game development roles, on titles like Animal Crossing (2001) for the 64DD and GameCube, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (2002) for the GameCube, Super Mario Galaxy 2 (2010) for the Wii, and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017) for the Wii U and Nintendo Switch. All of these are considered some of the best, most innovative, or most influential games ever released.

Upon graduating from the Design Department of Osaka University of Arts, Tezuka joined Nintendo in April 1984.^[2] With Shigeru Miyamoto, he co-designed the 2D platformer Super Mario Bros.—a sequel to the arcade game Mario Bros. (1983)—which released for the Nintendo Entertainment System home console in 1985. This began Tezuka and Miyamoto’s long-running, “legendary” creative partnership at the company.^[3][4][5] The pair first developed Super Mario Bros. as a shoot ’em up, before they experimented with gameplay based around Mario jumping. From there, it became a platformer, the shooting elements relegated to a bonus stage before being cut completely.^[6] The final project is considered one of the most important video games ever released.^[7][8] Mark Langshaw writes for Digital Spy:^[6]

To put it simply, Nintendo hit the bullseye with Super Mario Bros. Gamers back in 1985 had never seen a platformer done so well. Not only was it more colourful and vibrant than most other games on the market, the controls were inch-perfect, and the gameplay instantly infectious.

It was one of the first side-scrollers, a type of 2D platformer with a camera that pans across the game’s levels to center the player character when they start to reach the edge of the screen.^[7][8] It introduced the Super Mario series’ staple power-ups—items like the Super Mushroom and Fire Flower which give Mario helpful abilities—as well as its collectible coins; destructible brick blocks; and enemies which Mario can stomp on, like Koopa Troopas. The characters Bowser and Princess Peach also made their first appearance.^[6] Super Mario Bros.‘ first level, World 1-1, has been labelled “the most iconic of video game levels”.^[9] It is considered a “perfect level” in how it lets players new to Mario deduce the game’s numerous mechanics using a small amount of information, as it was only fifteen screens wide; this was especially important in 1985, when most of the mechanics were new to gamers.^[10][11]

Super Mario Bros. sold more than 40 million copies, making it the seventh best-selling video game ever as of 2023,^[8] and the first game ever played by millions of people.^[12] It was released in the aftermath of the video game crash of 1983, a recession that greatly harmed the gaming industry’s leaders in North America: Atari, Coleco, Magnavox, and Mattel. The medium’s marketability in the region had been destroyed, which analysts believed could be permanent. Tezuka and Miyamoto’s creation revived gaming in North America, and is greatly responsible for Nintendo’s current success. The resulting Super Mario series includes other titles considered to be “some of the most innovative and important platformers ever released”, like Super Mario World (1990).^[7][6][13] In 2021, TheGamer writer Josh Coulson said that Tezuka “has worked on pretty much every Mario game since the franchise’s inception”.^[14]

Tezuka is fond of fantasy novels such as J. R. R. Tolkien‘s The Lord of the Rings, and wrote the story and script for The Legend of Zelda and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link.^[15]

Tezuka was the director and visual designer of Super Mario Bros. 3, which released for the NES in 1988.^[16] He worked with Miyamoto.^[17]

Tezuka was the director of the SNES game Super Mario World, which released in 1990. Development of the game was relatively short, starting around 1988. Unlike with Super Mario Bros. 3, Tezuka did not serve as visual designer, feeling he worked on too many roles for the previous game. The role thus went to Shigefumi Hino. Super Mario World‘s developers wanted the game, a launch title for the SNES, to demonstrate how the console’s advanced hardware could lead to more complex types of gameplay than were possible on the NES. Tezuka thus came up with the idea of Mario being able to ride the dinosaur Yoshi.^[16]

While making Super Mario Bros. 3, Miyamoto drew a picture of Mario riding a horse, and put it up on a wall near his workspace at Nintendo. Tezuka assumed he wanted Mario to be able “to ride something” in a game. When Super Mario World‘s developers came up with its setting of a land populated by dinosaurs, Tezuka asked Hino to design one for Mario to ride, inspired by Miyamoto’s drawing. Hino’s first designs of Yoshi showed a realistic reptile-looking creature, described by writer Alex Wayro as being “like a sad turtle”. Feeling it looked out of place in Mario‘s world, Tezuka sketched a cuter version of the character, and gave him a shell that Mario uses as saddle. Hino then touched up Tezuka’s design, making the version of Yoshi seen in the final game.^[16][17] Yoshi became one of Nintendo’s “core” characters, appearing in future Mario games and starring in his own titular series.^[18]

In Super Mario World, when the player presses a button to make Yoshi stick his tongue out, an animation plays of Mario punching him in the head; after decades of debate by fans over if this was the case, Tezuka confirmed it in 2017. He said that after the game’s release, Nintendo’s designers learned that players felt bad for Yoshi, so Mario does not punch him in subsequent games where the player can make Yoshi stick his tongue out.^[19]

Tezuka produced the 2001 social simulation game Animal Crossing, which released in Japan for the Nintendo 64’s 64DD peripheral, and in other regions for the GameCube.^[20][21] In the game, the player controls the only human resident of a town of animals, and can interact with them in various ways.^[22] Animal Crossing has a virtual economy, and players earn money by completing villagers’ tasks, or selling items to Tom Nook, a local raccoon businessman. The player starts the game in a small, “crummy” house bought with loans from Nook. To get out of debt and improve their house, the player must sell him items, as they can’t pay him upfront.^[21] Animal Crossing‘s world updates in sync with the internal calendar on whatever device the game is running on; for example, the village will celebrate a holiday named “Bunny Day” if the calendar date corresponds with Easter.^[22]

Katsuya Eguchi designed Animal Crossing as a way to replicate the social experience of living in a small town, as he felt lonely after moving from such a place in Chiba Prefecture to Kyoto, Nintendo’s home city.^[20] It began development as a role-playing game.^[21] From there, Tezuka said, “we kind of made the theme of the game communicating directly with other characters and communicating directly with other players in your town”; communicating with other villagers is a requirement for the player to collect certain items, like clothing for their character and furniture for their house. In general, Animal Crossing was designed so the player could build “your own personal world” where “you’re free to do what you want to do”.^[20]

From left to right: Tezuka, Miyamoto, and composer Koji Kondo in 2015, promoting Mario Maker and the Super Mario series’ 30th anniversary

Tezuka worked on the 2015 Wii U game Super Mario Maker, which allows players to make their own 2D platformer Super Mario levels. Until the Wii U’s Nintendo Network online gaming service shut down in 2024,^[23] the game also let them play levels that other owners of the game created and uploaded online.^[24][25] Tezuka’s team started development wanting to utilize the Wii U GamePad‘s touchscreen display, and started on a sequel to Mario Paint (1992) that let players digitally paint with the guidance of the touch user interface. They eventually switched to making a simplified version of Nintendo’s internal level creation software used on previous Super Mario games.^[26] Tezuka also produced Super Mario Maker 2, which released for the Nintendo Switch in 2019. The sequel increased the amount of mechanics players could implement into their levels. It also introduced a story mode, and online multiplayer for any levels that users had uploaded.^[27][28]

In 2024, Tezuka said he felt some of the levels uploaded online on the Mario Maker games “were not very good”, and that that helped him answer a question he discussed with Miyamoto prior to the game’s release: if it was easier to make a good 2D platformer than a 3D one—the answer being no. He described the games as a “crowdsourced experiment” that taught him “even if design elements like controls and enemies are solid, ‘whether they come alive or fall flat are dependent on the level designer‘”.^[24]

Tezuka was the main developer of Super Mario Run, a 2D platformer released for mobile devices like the iPhone in 2016. Most of the original team behind the 1985 Mario game worked on this entry, including Miyamoto, who was producer.^[12] Mario Run sacrificed much of Mario’s traditional moveset in Super Mario games—designed for controllers— to work smoothly on a touch user interface.^[29] The character automatically runs to the right in the game’s levels, instead of the player controlling his speed and direction. To deter Mario from hitting obstacles, the player taps on the device’s screen to make him jump—the longer they tap, the higher he jumps.^[12] Tapping can also decrease the speed of his fall in mid-air.^[30] Reviewers had mixed opinions on Super Mario Run.^[31] They either called it “stylish, addictive”,^[30] and a “perfect” game for phones,^[32] or said it sacrificed too much of Mario’s controls to the point of it being “disposable”.^[29] However, the game was a financial success.^[31]

By 2018, Tezuka had been working for some time as senior officer of Nintendo’s Entertainment Planning & Development (EPD) division. That year, the company announced he had been promoted to executive officer of Nintendo’s board of directors, but that he would maintain his role at Nintendo EPD.^[33]

Tezuka was the producer of the 2D platformer Super Mario Bros. Wonder, released for the Nintendo Switch in 2023. Shiro Mouri served as director.^[25] Controlling Mario in the game, the player can touch certain flowers named “Wonder Flowers” to activate “Wonder Effects”, which change Mario’s design, or the layout, aesthetics, and mechanics of a level. Reviewers described the level change effects as “psychedelic“. The player can also equip a select number of badges before entering a level, which give Mario permanent abilities, such as making him run automatically at all times.^[34][35][36]

Wonder Effects were created as an attempt to replicate the developers’ experiences of being surprised by the secrets they found within video games as children. As Super Mario Bros. Wonder was designed to be accessible to all ages—and thus, varying skill levels—the badge system was as a way to make the game’s difficulty customizable by the player. The game’s main designers solicited ideas for Wonder Effects and badges from the entire development team, and in total, they received two thousand different submissions.^[25][24] Mouri first brought up the idea of Wonder Effects, telling Tezuka that the Wonder Flowers could transport Mario to a different location; Tezuka suggested that the world should change around Mario instead. Tezuka also created the voice-acted talking flowers that appear in some levels and tell Mario various things, including hints on what the level will contain.^[37]

Tezuka was the producer of the real-time strategy game Pikmin 4, also released for the Switch in 2023. It was a critical and financial success. Nintendo first announced the game in 2015, saying it was near completion, yet development continued for eight years afterwards. After the game’s release, Tezuka confirmed there would be a fifth mainline Pikmin game, and that “we’ll try not to let everyone wait.”^[38][39]