Retronauts - 773: Takashi Tezuka's Retirement Party

Episode Date: June 8, 2026

Jeremy Parish, Bob Mackey, and Diamond Feit grab some punch and cake as they celebrate the career of one of the most influential creators in gaming history: Nintendo's Takashi Tezuka, who retires this month after basically inventing entire genres.Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

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Click the banner to learn more. Retail sales only, some exclusions apply. See Store for Details. Delivery available on qualifying orders. This week in Retronauts, we find out how many gold watches you have to collect for a one-up. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retronauts episode 773. I am Jeremy Parrish. And this is a slightly impromptu episode, but it had to be done. We had to do it to them. And with me here for this celebration of a landmark career and a landmark event, we have core team members beginning here in the The Americas. Oh, wait. Yes. The Americas, not the U.S. though. Oh, hey, it's me, Bob Mackie. And I want to say it's more like Takashi Bazuka because his games blow me away. Wow. And I've been sitting on that one for a while, so thank you. Oh, boy. And who is that laughing? Hello, this is Diamond Fight. And if we, if we three are a golden triangle of retronauts, then I'm definitely the Kansai triangle.

And I am the Triforce of, I don't actually know which Triforce I would be. I'll call power. Oh, okay. You've got power. I've got gin. So, yes, this episode, we decided to record something quickly because we just found out a few days ago that one of the greatest and most influential and most important video game designers of all time is retiring. And it's kind of a rare treat to see someone who is a significant force in video gaming

leave the industry and go out of gaming on their own terms, and not because something terrible has happened. I feel like video games tend to be ride or die for life. And so usually when you find out that someone's no longer going to be making video games, it's because they're no longer with us. But in this case, the person in question is Nintendo's Takashi Tezuka, and he announced that he is retiring in June next month at the age of 65, which is a normal, sensible age to retire. It's, you know, generally what most people do. And he leaves behind a prodigious career of truly incredible video games.

Some of the greatest games of all time happened under his watch. And we want to talk about that because there aren't a whole lot of people who you could say, this man designed the Mario games and the Zelda games and a bunch of other games that basically shaped what video games are. And, you know, that deserves some recognition. You know, given this sort of closed corporate structure of Nintendo, like, Nintendo was especially, like, all of the game companies these days are incredibly secretive, but Nintendo was especially secretive. I'd just like to say that we certainly hope no disasters happened that will be revealed at the later date. And we're like, oh, boy, he retired because he was arrested.

You know, like, I hope, I hope no, the terrible news comes out of this. I hope this really is. For now we can say, he's not dead, but his career is. Yeah, I don't, I feel like of anyone in the industry, Tesika is one of the people, one of the few people where I could say, yeah, I don't think it's anything. thing bad that he did. He just seems like in every interview and, you know, even the few interactions I've had with him, he just seems so kind and just so good-natured. I mean, yeah, I guess there's always the milkshake duck factor, but I just, I don't see that with him. I see this as being, there's been, there's actually been a wave of retirements of longtime personnel at Nintendo in recent years.

Yes, yes, unfortunately. Because the people who, you know, define the company and its video game business in the 80s are now in their 60s and saying, you know what? I've been doing these all-nighters for 40 years and I would like to see my family again. I wonder what they're like now. I bet they're all grown up. So, you know, bless them. Yeah, the creator of Star Fox recently left Nintendo to draw manga and also he takes commissions for caricatures and I got one of those by T'Coye Memorah. Yep.

That's really cool. I did not know that one. He likes drawing big American noses and I've got one. He would love mine. He would be like, wow, that is a pointy beak, sir. Let me draw that five times its normal size for you. Jeremy, you mentioned that you actually had a run-in with Tezuka. I'm curious if anyone here got to interview him because I've only interviewed A.G. Al-Numa and Cojicondo, and I was very lucky to get those.

And I know that, Jeremy, you and I at least photo bombed Iwada and Miyamoto over a decade ago. But it sounds like you were able to touch the man. No, I mean, I don't recall ever actually interviewing him. Just, you know, I've been in his presence, which, you know, that's good enough. I've interviewed Miyamoto and Aounuma and a few other people, but I feel like he might have been in a roundtable that I covered. But, yeah, it's not like we're best buds or anything. He has been a fairly elusive person. I got the impression from some of the Iwada asks and.

ask a developer that he's not camera shy, but he doesn't necessarily like to talk about himself in his work unless it's sort of dragged out of him. And, you know, that was the magic of Mr. Iwada was that he had such great relationships with all of these developers that I think after a while they'd start talking and forget that, oh, yes, this is an interview. It was just, you know, friends bullshitting. Like they, they, there's one interview where they said, you know, they just like hang out at lunch and talk and, like, Tezico would show his photos that he took over the weekend, and they just, like, banter about that. So, yeah, he strikes me as being a little bit, you know, humble, like, not necessarily wanting to take credit for all the incredible things he did. But

when you look at his body of work, you know, Shigeromiyomoto's name gets attached to so many games. He's like, the creator of Mario, et cetera, like the creator of Super Mario, whether it's a creator of Zelda. Okay, yes, that is true. He was definitely the ideas guy and has a great sense of play and what makes things fun. But Tezica, for a lot of the, especially the formative days, was the person who had to actually take the big ideas and say, how do we turn these into, like, actual gameplay? Like, what do we do to make that an interactive thing that people would enjoy. And, you know, some of that also came from, oh, God, I just blanked on his name, from S-R-D, Morita, I believe. Was that his name? Morita was definitely in the mix there.

Yeah, yeah. The golden triangle thing I mentioned at the top, that was something I picked up from a Wada asked, because apparently they jokingly referred to these three guys as part of the like Miyamoto, Tezaka, and Toshihiko, Nakago. Nakago, that's it, yes. At SRD. And that's, like, I got to say, I would like to think I know a fair number of Nintendo personnel by this point, like, by name. And that was one I hadn't heard before. So if we're here today celebrating Tesika, rightly so, I guess we should also mention shout out Nagago because, like, that's person who gets even less attention. Yeah, he, we're not really making this episode about him. But I will say that he is someone who, I feel like his role in Nintendo.

history only relatively recently came to light because he was the programmer, not technically a Nintendo employee. S-R-D until recently was not a Nintendo property. He was kind of like intelligent systems and how. It was an external corporation, an external company that I think was actually in the beginning was pretty much just him, like just a couple of people. and they did the programming. He did the programming work for a lot of early Famicom games because expertise with the Hitachi wasn't it, 6502, a RICO 6502 processor was kind of uncommon in Japan.

So people who knew that, that hardware, and could coax performance out of it were very valuable. So that was Nakago's role, was programming so many of those. early games. So yeah, Miyamoto, Tezika, and Nakago, they were the golden triangle, as you mentioned. And they kind of represent different creative and technical forces. I feel like Teziko was sort of the intermediary between Miyamoto, the big grand idea is like, this would be a cool thing to do. How do we do that? That would be so neat. And Nakago, who was like, here's what we can actually do with 6502 assembly. And Tezegro was.

kind of in there, in the mix, making the maps and coming up with the power-ups and things like that and just figuring out, like, how do these things connect and how do they work? And how do we translate that into something that, you know, Mr. Nakago can turn into computer code. I went looking for Tesika, like old Tesica pictures, because, you know, when he's searched the matter internet, especially now post his announcement, you look up his name in almost every picture is a custom graphic that someone made for their website that has his name on it and like, oh, it says it could finally retire such a 40 years.

Like, I wanted to find just an actual picture of the guy like doing something. And the only one I could find was one from the 80s where he is very clearly operating a workstation and you can see a pixel Mario on the thing. But like, that's the only I can find, but that is very clearly like, okay, he's very much, he's in the minds, if you were. Like, he's got one hand on some sort of like a light pen or something and the other hand on the keyboard and he's got like multiple monitors and you've got block by block images of Mario's and

also what looks like gibberish to me, but I'm sure him it's like The Matrix. And he's just going at it. He's putting things together and God bless him. I say this to be complimentary, but he has always looked like a classic computer nerd. So you can understand why Miyamoto is the one in the spotlight because he is the more brash personality.

He's got the beautiful floppy hair that's good in salt and pepper over time. But Tezica has never changed his classic computer nerd look, and I respect that. Yeah. A lot of the Giawada asks pictures. He shows up and he's got like the jumpsuit on. You're like everyone else.

Everyone else is either dressed, business casual or like full-on suits. And Teska showed up like he just got out of like, you know, I don't know, snaking a toilet. He's ready to film Game Center CX. Yeah. Yeah, my understanding is that people at Nintendo wear those, like, once they get in the intersinctum, they do wear the Game Center CX jumpsuits. It seems cozy. Yeah, I bet it's comfortable. And if you're going to be pulling all-nighters, it's good to be to be comfortable.

Can we set a patron tier for jumpsuits? I need a jumpsuit. Oh, gosh. Sure. We can set that at like $30,000 a month. I don't know. This room gets kind of hot in the summer, so I'm going to avoid the jumpsuit life for now on. But we were talking about, like, Miyamoto getting a lot of the credit for a lot of things.

I understand why, because he's responsible for a lot of the credit. It does feel to me similar to, like, another old Japanese, business studio Jible where Hayao Miyazaki is the face of that company and a lot of people think, well, he's the guy who drew everything and a lot of people's names are buried because of that. I'm sure Miyazaki does not want that to happen, but people really love an easy narrative or a narrative that like cast one person as the hero like, oh, Matt Graney created everything on the Simpsons. He wrote every joke, things like that. I feel like we are just addicted to that shorthand when it comes to narrative. And unfortunately, because of that, Tezica's name is not

spoken of as often as some of these other people. I think also in Japan, you have much more of a top-down business culture where there is like the guy at the top making the decisions. And, you know, after the success of some of those early Famicom games, Miyamoto was put in that position for R&D4, the division that they created specifically for him. And Tezica was kind of his, you know, right-hand man, basically, who is, you know, his, uh, his lieutenant, I guess you could call him like the general to the shogun. And, you know, you saw that in R&D1, where you have, um, gumpi Yokoi gets credit for so many things, but, uh, I'm old and senile. I'm totally forgetting the name of the guy who

actually designed, you know, did a lot of the design work on Game Boy, but, um, he was kind of in the trenches doing a lot of the actual nuts and bolts work. But, you know, when you're the, that kind of top level person, you sort of get the credit for everything, but also if something goes wrong, you take the blame. And, you know, there's, there is that sense of accountability and responsibility. So it's a double-edged sword, as it were. Yeah, I can see that. I think we saw that with Yokoy, you know, when he pushed out the, stood behind the virtual

Boy and it was a disaster before it even launched. And they were like, well, you, the most senior of our game development and hardware development staff are going to be out on the show floor demonstrating this hardware to consumer representatives. Like, that's, I'm sure, that was a tough pill to swallow. But that was, you know, kind of his penitence for making a bad call with Virtual Boy, from what I understand. So Tesika doesn't necessarily get the credit, but also, you know, I'm sure even though he was involved in Wii music, he also didn't take the blame for that one. Yeah, I guess he wasn't out on stage letting us know how awesome this is going to be and getting all that negative attention. Right. He was like, no, I'm going to let Miyamoto be the man behind Ravi drums. We all remember that guy's name. Yep.

I can't remember the name of the guy who designed the Game Boy, despite having written about it so many times. but I remember Robbie Drums. You know, now that I think about it, I actually, the closest I came to any of these people was with you, Jeremy, when we attended that 30th anniversary Super Mario concert that was also doubled as sort of Super Mario Maker launch event

in Tokyo. Yeah, Chris Kohler. Yeah, Chris Kohler was there. But I'm saying on the stage, far away from us in the audience, Miyamoto was there, Tezika was there, Kondo was there, many musicians were there,

a person dressed up as Mario was there, of course. It might have been actually Mario. That could have been the real Mario, imagine. But yeah, so that's the closest I came to any of these people in real life. Yeah, I feel like I was very fortunate and kind of came in at the tail end of accessibility to some of these creators, where they were actually still out, you know, sort of on the circuit. So I did not, well, I mean, I appreciated it at the time, but in hindsight, I didn't realize what a fleeting moment that was. So I do, you know, kind of cherish those memories. Even if I did not actually directly interview Tezica, Selavi.

You might have seen one of your review scores and smiled. It brought him great jollity. Maybe not the New Super Mario Brothers score. But surely my Kotaku feature on ranking Mario games, when he saw a new Super Mario Brothers you up there, he was like, this guy knows. he gets it. I made his day. He's got to be happy with a B plus. He would be happy with B plus, wouldn't he? For New Super Mario Brothers, you?

No, the original, when you rated New Super Mario Brothers of B Plus. Like, that's a fair. Yeah, I mean, no, that's a great score. Yeah. That's just, it was like the only one that wasn't 100%. Miamoto's back, baby. I'm just saying, it's not like an ultimate ghouls and ghost kind of thing. It was just like, hey, this game is fine. But I also scored that one correctly. So it all works out. I was going to ask, was anyone surprised by this announcement? I guess he is 65.

Miyamoto is obviously still there. He's about a decade older. He's more of a figurehead. But we've seen a lot of people leave. Like Imamori mentioned him, the Star Fox creator. I think Kenske Tanabe, did he recently leave within the past year? Yeah, obviously headed up a lot of the retro studio stuff, but he's the guy responsible for the version of Mario 2 that we know and love. Yeah, you have guys like Aounuma and Hayashita who are in their 50s now.

They're like the young bloods. And they're due for. retirement in a decade. So a lot of legacy talent at Nintendo, which is a strength for the company. It's one of the reasons Nintendo games are so good because instead of just bloodletting and wiping out their entire development staff after every game is complete, they say, what if we took those people who now have all this great experience, making a good game and working together and really maximizing the processes and set them loose on another project so they can bring that expertise and that experience to bear and create.

even better games. It's a rare and cool thing in the video games industry, a real, a real revelation that the other 99.9% of the business doesn't seem to have caught on to yet, but maybe someday they'll figure it out. And doing that does make the line go up. People don't recognize that. That's true. Yeah. It's true that we have lost a number of top people who have been with the company for 30, 40 years, depending on their personal backgrounds. But in almost every case, when they step down, they usually, you can see either in their credits or they'll say someone by name. It's like, oh, well, yes, I am leaving,

but of course, this person right here who joined the company in the early 21st century has now been with the company for 20 years, and they'll probably just do what I was doing. So Nintendo does at least have a good track record of not only these legacy people, but also those legacy people basically creating their own replacements and trust those people to go forward. I know Tanabe specifically mentioned, I think it was Lisa Takeda, I forget the name,

but he specifically mentioned someone who had worked with, he'd worked with on numerous projects of the last decade, two decades. And he's like, yeah, she'll just whatever I was supposed to do in the future, she'll do that now. She can do it. Yeah, I feel like Tezika handed a lot of his responsibilities to, like I said, a Gucci for Animal Crossing, to Takahashi for, no, geez, I just totally, Halyashida for the Mario games. And, you know, Eguchi, I think he's getting older, so he's kind of looking to Ayakio

Goku to sort of take the reins after him, I imagine. So there is kind of a mentoring system for sure, which is, again, a strength for Nintendo that other companies do not seem to have grasped, even though it's all just right there in the open. But Tessica is, I think, really unique just because he was so, heavily responsible for the rise of Nintendo as a gaming entity. I mean, the company had a pretty good track record by the time he joined the company in 1984. But, you know, those early arcade successes and their very early work on the Famicom in Japan, like, that could have been a flash

in the pan. That could have been, like, it's here and then it's gone. And I feel like Tezico was was really instrumental in making sure that didn't happen. He came in, worked in collaboration with Miyamoto and with Nakago. Yeah, he came in, worked with his other sides of the Golden Triangle, and just ensured that Nintendo games stood for quality, that it was something that you could trust. When you bought a game that said Nintendo on it, it would be. a good time and possibly a cutting edge time. Maybe you would have a game experience that you'd never enjoyed before, and it was done better than anyone else in the business could do it.

That was a big part of what he brought to the table, and that's not nothing. I delighted in reading about his early days at Nintendo because he had such a – he had an unusual story that he joined the company part-time at first, and he started out doing pixel art for punchout in the arcades, which is already kind of like, wow, That's a game that, wow, that's a great looking game. Okay, nice, nice job. It was a super punchout, actually. The super, yeah.

I'm guessing because, like, another company provided all of the cell artwork for that game. He must have just been programming, like, transforming that into sprite art for the game. That would make sense, yeah. But that was his entry point, but he was still, like, a student at the time. Then he graduates. He actually joins the company full time. And just really, early on, he sort of gets in there with, you know, Miyamoto and Koji Kondo. And they're all working together on Devil World.

And it's just kind of a funny thing because apparently he shows up and, you know, everyone else in this in this room looks at it's like, oh, Devereworld, this kind of looks like Pac-Man, doesn't it? And someone had to tell Texaco what Pac-Man was because he just, he didn't really come to this with some sort of deep game knowledge. He came there as, you know, with his art, his art knowledge and I guess his, you know, whatever computer background he had. And he had, he didn't really have any sort of deep, interesting games at the start. I also read that he apparently, he got the job of Nintendo and he showed up at Nintendo, but he did not have a Famicom, and he wasn't even sure what it was when it was first mentioned to him. He assumed it was an actual computer and not a game console. Yeah, I feel like a big part of why Miyamoto and Tezica got along so well and worked so well together is because both of them came not from the sense of I want to make video games. They came to the company wanting to work in visual arts and be creative and expressive in that sense. And I feel like, you know, that could have been disastrous, but they brought just a different sort of approach and discipline to video games. In the early days, a lot of video games were made by programmers. They would design the game.

They would create the artwork. And, you know, they might have been technically masterful, but programmers don't always have, you know, the most fluid, I would say, sense of creativity and artistry, which is not to say they, like, none of them do. It's just those two mental disciplines, I feel, sit in fairly distinct spaces. And finding that overlap is pretty rare. That's why they needed Nakago, because he was the technical guy who could come in and say, Here's what you can do in two kilobytes of RAM. And, you know, they didn't approach it from the technical sense. It was not like, you know, what can we program this chip to do? What can we pull down from this hardware? It was what's fun.

What's enjoyable for people? What looks interesting? What is a good experience? And, you know, I feel like that's a big part of the secret sauce of what made those early defining Nintendo. no creations distinct and so good. They had, you know, that sense of creativity, that sense of artistry that they approached the problem from. And then they had a really great programmer who knew the Famicom hardware and understood it. So he could create technically great stuff, get some assists from guys like Iwada to provide consulting and tips and tricks. And it's just a

fantastic combination shows what, you know, what kind of approaching things from a different direction than usual and having varied interests and disciplines can bring to, you know, any medium, really, but, but especially video games. Yeah, I think it helps that these two outsiders came in not knowing the limitations of games and then just thinking of what's, what's a fun idea and then figuring out the limitations later. So that's why we get things like Donkey Kong and Super Mario Brothers and the Legend of Zelda because no one was thinking on these terms because they're like, here's our limitations. We have to work within them.

And then I feel like later in a funny way, that would be a problem with working under Miyamoto. He's like, well, there are no limitations. Just I have a crazy idea. Make a game based on it or implement this in the game. And I'm the boss. You have to listen to me. Yeah. And Tessica's job was to go in and say, okay, boss.

How is that going to work? Make Mario's close metal. Do it now. It's 1985. That was a baked in feature. of the N64 hardware. They had built-in metallic highlights right in the system. But, but, you know, it's not like Tesika came in and he was just instantly a video game

design genius. He said that when he was working on Devil World, if you ever played it, I'm sure all of us have, but maybe the people on listening to the podcast have not because it, you know, didn't get released in the U.S. until many, many years later. It's sort of Pac-Man-like in that you are moving around a maze, collecting stuff. You have to find crosses, I believe, and stick them into a center space of the maze. But the maze is shifting. There's this frame.

It's almost like a picture frame on rollers that's moving around. And you can't control that. So you have to kind of work within the movement of the frame and not get squished up against the mazes. And Tesica came in and said, okay, so there's these rollers on the side and the walls could squish you. But what if it were holes instead? And so people tried that version and they said, actually, this is not very fun. Let's go back to the rollers. So, you know, he had a learning process.

He admitted to that in one of the Iwana asks interviews. But, you know, you live and you learn. And I feel like he intuited what was a good time pretty quickly because I believe he then worked on ExciteBike. And then his team with Miyamoto and Nakago basically started working on Zelda. and Mario simultaneously. And one of the interesting things that came out of the Iwada asks interview is that Zelda was actually in the works before Super Mario Brothers, but it changed so much in the course of its development that it ended up coming out later.

And I'm sure, you know, that was at some point they said, oh, we should stick this on the disk system and take advantage of those features. But it started out as just like a dungeon game and the, you know, pretty much like the Tower of Draga. But then at some point, I believe Tezica said he was the one who said, wouldn't it be more interesting if there were a world above and it weren't just dungeons and there were something linking it all together? No pun intended.

And so, you know, the game shifted and evolved and they finished Super Mario Brothers first instead, which I think worked out because, you know, they did time Zelda's launch to the Famicom Disc System. And we did recently publish an episode on the 40th anniversary of Zelda and its legacy. So you can visit that for more details. Look up the episode for details, as Link would say. Never forget that in Japan, Super Mario Brothers and Legend of Zelda came out like five months apart. Yes, indeed. Yeah, really close.

The craziest thing about Zelda is they create this entirely new gaming experience that changes everything. And then they realize, oh, there's room left over. Let's do it a second time on the same disc. That's just how capacious the disk system was. It was radical. And Tensica's involvement in Zelda to me is interesting because obviously he's there, he's there from Ground 1. He's there on Zelda. And as he describes that he comes in, he joined part way to Link to the Pass, which I guess

apparently had some troubles, which I guess makes sense because, you know, unlike with, you know, Super Mario Brothers and Legend of Zelda, the original games, Super Mario World was a launch title for Super Famicom. and Link to the Past didn't show up to at least a year later, so they clearly had to have some extra time on that one. But after Link to the Past, that's when they start experimenting with, hey, can we get this game to work on the Game Boy?

And then he and other staff members kind of started messing around with that. But because they're just like hanging out, like we talked about earlier, they just kind of goof off a little bit and they sort of experiment and they decide to sort of take this project in a different direction. And based on what of the, interviews I've read, Miyamoto was completely uninvolved in that project.

He's like, yeah, we're kind of going in our own direction here, and what if we start to put Mario characters in this game? What if we put Kirby in this game? What if we make this game

kind of like Twin Peaks? That show we heard of is airing on NHK. It's like, and it becomes this whole other thing, and I think we probably owe Tezica a lot. Again, not just,

he's just the one guy. Obviously, other people worked on that. I know, I believe, Koizumi was this credited scenario writer, but still, that's kind of like more of Tezica's thing, not a Miyamoto jam. And it's my favorite Zelda game personally. But yeah.

Yeah, the Iwada asks about some of the Zelda games where they start talking about Link's Awakening before Iwada actually gets into the room. And they're talking about how Tezika was just like, oh, yeah, we should put Mario in here. And then we stuck Kirby in there. They were like, did you get permission for that? And he said, no. And then Iwada shows up and and they all change the subject. It's an off model Kirby. You can just call him Carby. It's fun. Yeah, yeah. He's very starchy.

No, Antezico was the one who introduced the Twin Peaks element to it. And, you know, whether he was just a huge fan or he was just kind of curious about it, either way, you know, he was elevated to the role of assistant director, beginning with Smurrier Brothers, from just staff. And the thing about in the 80s game design roles is that director and designer were generally pretty synonymous. When you had a small team, generally directing a game just meant you're like designing how it works, figuring out the play and the mechanics, the power-ups, how the levels kind of flow together. So he kind of immediately ascended to that role and then promptly assistant. designed or assistant directed two of the most influential games of all time. They were massive sellers, but also so many people have looked to the Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Brothers and said, wow, these are amazing. Let's make a game just like this. Or let's take

these ideas and use them our own way. That's a pretty impressive start. Yeah, and it sounds like I know Miamoto obviously very hands-on with everything, but once he ascended to the role of producer, Tessica was a boots on the ground guy for a very long time directing all of these amazing sequels that would go on to define these franchises even more than the originals in some cases. Yeah, Tessica would ascend to the role of producer himself after about a decade in the trenches. And generally, producers, you know, they have influence for sure, but they're more of a, generally their role is just to keep things flowing to make sure timelines are hit. that their team has the resources they need, that there are no massive problems, and, you know,

everyone kind of keeps on track. So, for like a decade, Tezica was really one of Nintendo's main design people, one of the people calling the shots and saying, like, this is how this game works, this is what should be fun. And, you know, he's kind of stepped away from that after, I believe during the Super Nies era. But up until that point, so much of what we associate with just what is a good video game is kind of, you know,

flowed from Tezica's mind. It's like, you know, you read his CV, the list of games he's worked on. And whether he's producer, director, designer, whatever, it's just, it's an amazing list of just,

you know, things that any developer would put one of those games on their resume and say, God, I worked on this. That's incredible. And he led them and designed them all. Yeah. If you look at his gamography from 85 to 95,

there's not even an A minus on that list. It's all A plus generational defining titles like from top to bottom. It's incredible. It's probably, it might be the best run as a video game director. I don't have like entire list of all directors in front of me, but it's hard to think of anyone else who excelled

this much. It's not just that he worked on so many great games. It's that he, it was like machine gunfire. It was, it was just like nonstop. It was like, here's an awesome game. Here's an awesome game. I mean, you know, the games he designed in the, in the, sorry, the NES era, he worked on Super Mario Brothers, the Japanese Super Mario Brothers, too, which, you know, take it or leave it. Super Mario Brothers 3. He worked on dokey, dokey panic. He's credited as meddler in doki, dokey panic. I don't know what that role actually is, but it sounds like he, you know, in the U.S. credits, he is credited for creating graphics. But, yeah, he's like, he's the Super Mario Brothers 3 guy. He's the guy who said, wouldn't it be great if Mario could fly? And everyone said, that breaks the game. And then he sat down and said, let's figure out how.

how not to break the game and to make it good. And also because he says, Miyamoto is a huge fan of westerns and cowboy movies and always wanted Mario to be able to ride a steed. He wanted Mario to write a dinosaur or a dragon or something, and it was just technically beyond the limitations of the NES. So Tezica said, well, I want to bring this into the game for you. So let's give Mario the ability to put on animal suits

and turn into a Tanuki or a frog or I guess a hammer brother. Is that an animal? I don't know. Sure. Some kind of turtle. Yes, a turtle, a turtle guy with hammers. So, you know, like, you just kind of get a sense of the interplay through these anecdotes. You know, it's not like Miyamoto is saying, no, you fool.

You're lying. Why are you taking credit for this? It's all kind of jovial and back and forth. Like, oh, yeah, yeah, you did that. But, you know, you really get the sense that that Tesika would take. these wild-eyed ideas that Miyamoto had that were technically impossible and say, how can we make this work? How can we give players an experience that's comparable that gives them the same sensation,

even if it's not exactly as Mr. Miyamoto described? And, you know, over time, technology would change and evolve, and then those big ideas would suddenly become possible to do. So then it was, you know, on them to say, oh, hey, here's that. idea that we, you know, we banked five years ago, we can do it now because we have a processor that's 10 times as powerful. So let's do it. Yeah, speaking of writing a dinosaur, I do believe that Tesika is credited with redrawing or at least rearranging Yoshi from the initial sort of pixel art to what we ended up getting

because, yeah, if you look back at early documents, early prototypes, they do is, Yoshi kind of looks like the weird Mario that shows a Mario Maker sometimes. He's just too lanky, and I believe Teska is the one who's like, no, we got to make a little more rounder and adorable. Yeah, he's like a little more cupa-like, turtle-like, the original Yoshi, yeah. Yeah, I noticed that with a lot of his games, these A-plus games, many of them he was given in an order and amount of time to work on them, things like Mario 3 and Yoshi's Island. And I know he's credited with assistant director on Mario 64, but when I did an episode about that, I was reading a lot of interviews. And it sounds like he entered the picture, like, about with a year of development left on that game. And he was just happy he wasn't working on it in the time he was working on Yoshi's Island.

He's like, you guys were having a lot of problems. I was just making this like super inventive 2D platformer. But you were trying to decide like what the future of the technology will be. Yeah. And it does seem like he came in midway through some of the bigger projects. Like he did not start out on a link to the past, I believe. That was someone else's project. and then he was kind of brought in midway through

and helped, you know, birth it basically, get it over the finish line. But then from that, you know, they kind of seized on that experience and said, let's do Link's Awakening. So, you know, he's been very heavily involved in things and I'm not by any means saying like, oh, yes, Mr. Tezica invented all of these games.

But, you know, he was involved in different degrees. And I just feel like if you look at his body of work, it's like he does a good thing. he works on a good thing, and then something else that might even be better spins out of it and, you know, results from that. The interesting thread that I picked up on is that he's very open with fact that he's not, like he literally says at a point, I'm not that good at playing video games. I have that quote here.

And I do, I also think that in the 2D and 3D divide, which we all sort of lived through at the time, I think that he was definitely more of a 2D type of person, which is why like he is work in the 3D games, I think, was probably from a perspective of someone who was more comfortable with a 2D game. And I would bet that a lot of his input was like, okay, well, how do we make this more accessible to someone who's not so good at navigating the 3D space? And I feel like time and again, you see his input in those games, while not hands of the ground where he was in the NES era, he was definitely there overseeing things and asking, well, what about this? Does this work? Can this be more entertaining? You know, people keep talking about, what are the

the quotes I have. Hang on. I mean, I saved these separately. Uh, yeah, I Wada said, joy and satisfaction were the core of the various points to Texarkasan's advice. You know, he would just get in there and he would say, is this fun? And if it's fun, like that, that means it's good enough, you know, like, it didn't have to make sense. I think there's an anecdote where he was talking about, I think it's Super Mario 3D land, where he's testing Super Mario 3D land. And that harkened back to the, you know, to 2D, even though it's a 3D game, in many ways it harkened back to the 2D games. And he gets to a checkpoint and the checkpoint flag

happens and he's like, well, hey, normally when you do this, you get like a bonus, you know, like in Super Mario world, if you're small Mario, get powered up Super Mario. And they're like, oh, I mean, is that important? He's like, well, it's a bonus. It's fun. And they're like, oh, oh, yeah, it is fun, isn't it? So it's like.

Yeah, Diamond, I'm glad you brought that up because I did remember when I did a lot of research on Mario 64 reading interviews, one of their biggest regrets, Miyamoto or Teseka, or perhaps both, is that they lost a lot of people, regardless of how good the game game was, a lot of people just had to bail in that era. And I knew a lot of people in my past. I know a lot of people now who just said, I just could not wrap my mind around controlling a

character in a 3D space. So, like, regardless of how hard they worked, they knew we were leaving some people behind with this new perspective on games. I've seen it. Absolutely. Yeah. I know that when Super Mario Galaxy came out for the Wii and my wife and I, a child was on the way, The child was not here yet. And I was super excited because I had a big 3D Mario. I had already played 64 for many years. And my wife really didn't. Like her Mario memories were like the Famicom era.

And I saw firsthand, like she really couldn't understand how to approach a Gumba and jump on it in a 3D space, let alone one where you're literally in space and the world is turning around. She's like, I don't understand what's happening here. Which is why. And this comes up in a column that I've written that will be. live by the time this episode goes up. In new Super Mario Brothers, they, you know, at that point, 2000, in the early 2000s, Mario had been

3D for a very long time and pretty much only 3D, except for remakes and such, they came back, like, look, we can make Mario in 3D, we know how to do this, but we've got this gap. There's a gap between players who know what Mario's like in 3D and the latest technology,

and all those people who played Mario in the early days, and that's what they remember, and they don't understand how this works, And Tesika is the one who said, we should just make another 2D Mario. Let's just do it. And that's what they did. And, you know, B plus, A plus, whatever you feel like New Street in Mario Brothers, I feel like that project is incredibly important for reminding people and reminding

Nintendo in general. It's like, hey, we can just make 2D games. There's no rules since we can't make 2D games. The hell with the idea that 3D games are the only way to make games now, just make a 2D game. It's fine. Yeah, I mean, they weren't the only company making 2D games. in that 2.5D space,

but for them to put the Mario name behind it was a meaningful decision. It was a statement. I will say that there is an Ask a Developer interview where Tezica talks about, I think Super Mario Brothers wonder, about how playing in 3D space gives you a lot more options than in 2D space.

And they notice that sometimes people in the 2D games, games, Mario has a reputation for being really challenging in 2D. They would get discouraged. They would lose and get sent back. I saw this with my wife when she was playing New Super Mario Brothers. She would make it to write up against a checkpoint but not quite hit the checkpoint, run out of lives. And then she'd have to do all of that like three or four stages all over again, which was

kind of when I started going on a crusade against how kind of pointless the lives system in games like Mario is. They got rid of it in Odyssey. But Tusica said, you know, like, in a way, 2D games are harder because if you make a mistake, they cascade. They add up because you don't have as many options to work around them as you do in 3D space.

So you have to approach it differently. And that led to the sticky notes that were shared where he just had like little handwritten notes that were kind of like, to me, embody his, at least what I perceive as his game design philosophy. Things like, use the concept of multiplication to expand ideas and create. So like take an idea and build on it, expand on it, like keep iterating on it and, you know, take something that's good and just do more of it. Don't try to do it all alone. He has been very much a team player. Different people find different things

fun. And don't simply replace things. Change the entire approach. New inspirations. So I think that was specifically talking about Super Mario Brothers Wonder, where they were like, we want the stage elements to change, but we don't want it to just be copy and paste. So what if the stages themselves transformed in unexpected, surprising ways? And to my knowledge, Super Mario Brothers Wonder is the final game that he will have a producer credit on, unless, you know, something comes out in the next year or two. And I feel like, you know, you look from Super Mario Brothers to wonder, and that's quite a career. He's been involved in all the core Mario games and, you know, guiding and sort of mentoring people to continue working in that vein, but also never to keep doing the

same things over and over again. Even the new Super Mario Brothers games, which took a lot of flack for looking the same and having the same music, each one has its own distinct hook and takes a distinct approach to what it means to be a 2D Mario game. And, you know, I think a lot of that is down to Tezica and just his sense of like, what's fun for people. It's going to be, it's going to be a different thing for different people. So let's try to explore a lot of different iterations and a lot of different concepts. Yeah, I think that extends to the.

development of Mario Wonder, a lot of it was born out of the pandemic and people working from home, but they came up with a system in which anyone at the company could submit an idea for the game, and they did use a lot of those ideas. That's why, like, every level has a new, whatever the Wonder Power Up, is it called the Wonder Mushroom? Whatever it is, I played through the game a couple of years ago, but a lot of the levels are based around. You pick up this one thing and the level transforms around you, and a lot of those were submitted by just regular staff people at Nintendo. So we kind of ran through everything we had to talk about.

Maybe that's all this episode is. We don't necessarily need to belabor the point. Well, we can talk about what should be the proper way to commemorate Tezica's career. Now, I'm thinking a statue outside of Nendezu HQ is probably too much. But I do think that at the Nintendo Museum, they could, at the very, very least, install some sort of like Hall of Fame or some sort of photograph and, you know, maybe get in, because I think, you know, Bob, we've been there. We all agree that sort of the Nintendo Museum could use a lot more, like, people, you know? Yes, yes.

There's plenty of, like, game boxes you can look at, but it would be great with there more people there. Like, that would be a good way to start things where off. It's like, here's a panel of people who made Nintendo what Nintendo is, and it's a very important, their careers cannot be understoodated. So, like, Tezica is definitely a Hall of Fame guy, you know, I don't know if they would have the balls to put, you know, Yokoai up there, but still, Tesika is a guy who spent their, you know, 42 years there. He's touched just about everything that makes Nintendo Nintendo, maybe not Metroid, but still, put him up there. Also, I feel like, given their long relationship with Nintendo, the Seattle Mariners should give Tezica a baseball jersey and immediately retire it and then put it up in the stadium. That'd be great. That's how I feel.

Also, he should throw out a pitch at some point. Yeah, I'm curious as to whether or not Tezica will have any impact on Nintendo in the future. I don't think they're just going to put him in a chair and face him towards the window and just let him finish out the rest of his life. I wonder if he will be in meetings every once in a while. I mean, like, I'm not sure what happens to these folks once they leave these companies that they're out for like 40 years. But do we think he just will be outside of those walls for the rest of his life? I would assume, given his age, that he probably, he's. either has another idea that he'd like to work on, be it personal or just some, some sort of

other gig, or he's just going to do his own thing. Like, I was thinking one of the, I don't was it Tanabe, but someone is leaving, some longtime Nintendo employee is leaving, and he's, like, joining a local university, and he's going to head up, like, sort of, like, a game design department at the university. And I think because Desolica's position is so high up, they had to, like, announce his departure formally in advance for stockholders or whatever. And that's why we have all this big new stuff. Whereas some of these guys who left Nintendo after like decades long, we only found out about it because they mentioned it on Facebook six months ago and no one noticed, you know?

So because of because of, because of the Texas goes to position, we have this advanced notice, but also we don't know what's coming next because he hasn't said what's coming next. And it could be something entirely different. It could just be, you know, he wants to start gardening. Like it could be anything. I mean, he did work on Pickman. It's unfair to demand more out of the guy, given how much he's given us. But I was just thinking of Takay and Mamura, who created Star Fox, worked on a lot of games for Nintendo, had nearly just as long as a tenure is almost as old as Tezica.

He left to draw manga and create a new video game and do commissions online. And he seemingly left on good terms. I follow him on Twitter. And he has nothing but glowing things to say about everybody he's ever worked with. He had a lot to say about Tezica leaving the company. So, I mean, I don't expect that from Tezica, but it's just like, it's a wild card at this point as to whether or not, we will see him work on any new games in his late 60s. Yeah, I feel like if he were going to be taking some sort of side advisory role with Nintendo,

they would have said, you know, I mean, effectively, Miyamoto retired several years back and became the creative fellow, which, you know, kind of, I think, means he's just like there to, you know, throw on some ideas and kind of be, a bit of a mentor and, you know, sort of a public face for the company. But he's not, like, down in the salt mines, you know, working hard every day. It's much more of a, you know, a very, I wouldn't say sinecure, but, but a very light requirement, light responsibility for him. When do you think the last year that Miyamoto actually bathed inside Nintendo HQ was? Was it 1990 or 1993?

99? I don't know. Maybe they like built him his own private bathroom. Certainly he earned it. I think he just shows up every day in case Chris Pratt wants to take a tour of Nintendo. He'll be there. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe once they moved out of the factory and he didn't have the wash bin to use, he stopped doing the bathing at Nintendo headquarters. I just fear that once we stop recording this podcast, we'll find out that Tezica has been acquired by Tencent. Or the Saudis.

I mean, Jeremy, you say that, but this week, Katsuharadha, who left, who left NAMCO after decades, you know, he's like, oh, I won't say what I'm doing next. What is he doing next? He's forming a new studio with S&K and it's... You hate to see it, folks. Yeah. But let's talk about good things. Let's talk about, okay, so Tezica ascended to production with Star Fox 60. That was the first game that he, instead of being like the director-designer, he was more of like the, you know, let's keep things going and I'll offer you feedback, but I'm not going to be down there sweating it out with you every night. But looking beyond that, there's so many games that he oversaw. I did not make a complete comprehensive list because that would be, you know, that would be like just 10 minutes of us reading off game titles.

but just a few of these that he produced or played the role of Supervisor include Yoshi's story. Don't love that one. Never quite got how it works. That's maybe on me. But Ocarina of Time. I hear people like that one. The Smash Brothers series.

The Mario Golf series. The Mario Tennis series. The Paper Mario series. The Animal Crossing series. The Pickman series. The Luigi's Mansion series. What else was there? A lot of the Donkey Kong spin-off games.

Mario Hoops, the Big Brain Academy series, literally every Zelda game that has been made to date he has had a role in, including TriForce Heroes, but we won't hold that against him. All the Yoshi's games, it's just, like, and of course the Mario games. It's just, oh, new Super Mario Brothers, of course. It's crazy. It's unbelievable that one person would have a key role in so many great games. Yeah, it's really hard to wrap your mind around and think of a way to some help his career in 90 minutes because he's just touched everything for, again, I guess, 42 years. Is that what's going on here? 43 years?

Correct. If we're going with 84, yeah, it's 42. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, this could just turn into a podcast about how much we love X game and X series. But, you know, we've done a lot of those. So it's not necessarily something we need to. Have we done a Pickman episode? I thought, I think we have.

I think you have. Have I? I don't know. It's, I'm, you know, I'm old and due for retirement too. We are in year 20, so I forgive you if you forget. Yes, 419, episode 419, Pickman. And I think you might have headed that up, Jeremy. Right.

Well, good on me. That was definitely a topic that we needed to cover. So I'm glad we did. No, I feel like just about all of these series, aside for maybe some of the sports ones, we've addressed and dedicated entire episodes to. Sometimes not just the series, but the game, you know, the individual games within those series. So I see Odom on the list. He's provided us with many, many hundreds of hours of content. Yeah, yeah, actually.

I'm coming up with the grand theory that for the past 20 years, Retronauts has been a Takashi Tezuka podcast. We're springing this on you now. That explains why we're the Nintendo Nauts. Okay. Yeah. So, okay, here's a question I'm going to ask you. Aside from the obvious ones, you know, a link to the past or the kind of the early primalsals. So the games that he produced, which of these on this list that I put here is your favorite experience? What is the one game you're like, hell yes. Thank you for that, Mr. Tessica. Just one. Boy, it's really hard to pick, but because it is a recency bias in breaking news, I might say Star Fox 64, it is the game so nice Nintendo made it thrice.

And they'll probably make it again. And I mean, Star Fox, the original game, is just like playing with technology. 64 is when they figure out like the best version of that. And they have never surpassed it. Every other Star Fox has been like kind of mediocre. And I can see why they keep returning to that well. So I will credit Tezica's strong producer. for why that game turned out so good and why Nintendo is fixated on it and why it's everyone's

favorite version of Star Fox. Do you think that's why he retired? He was like, God damn it, guys, again? Seriously, I'm out of here. Maybe he was like, well, my work is done here. I've been here so long. They're remaking a game twice, something I originally worked on. That just shows me I need to be having one foot out the door, I guess.

Well, we just talked about credits. Presumably his name will be on that game somewhere. The new one is coming out, Jim. Yeah. For me on this list, I would probably go with Super Mario 3D Land. I feel like that game, that game was crucial when it came out, and I feel like it kind of got overshadowed quickly. And especially once World came out for Wii U and everyone decided, oh, we all want to play this game together and run around and get the cherries or whatever. But I really loved 3D land, and I feel like it's kind of an weird spot where it is clearly made for a 3D console.

Like, it's not just 3D land because it's 3D game. Like, this game was meant to be played on the 3D screen, so I don't know that has Nintendo reissued it in any way? I don't think they have. I don't believe so. So it's going to be, you know, it's not lost media, but it's like, it's clearly something made for a handheld system with a gimmicky screen that I don't think they're ever going to reissue.

But boy, that was a lot of fun. And based on the interviews, while he was not a, you know, boots in the ground kind of guy, he was definitely involved in many steps. And he was very much, you know, his input was there. his input was cherished. And he was like, hey, what about this? And, you know, can't we do more? I think he was working about tales, tales on things.

It's cool if more things had tales. So, Texaco all about tail? I bet he loved Mori-Mori, slime Mori-Mori Dragon Quest. I can only hope so. They came out the same week. Oh, wow. The third version. Right, no, he was probably like, ah, damn it.

Too many tales for Tesa. I've been overshadowed. Yeah, I really love 3D land. That was a game where I got the review copy and devoured it in like a day or two. I remember laying in bed at night finishing the game and then I unlocked the Luigi mode. I was like, it's 2 a.m. and I need to sleep. But I got to see what's going on with Luigi here. I got to find out it was that good.

It just, yeah, hooked me. But I would have to say that my pick on this list of the post-16-bit games, maybe Super Mario Maker, just because it was such a like, oh, Nintendo's letting you do that, you know, build your own Mario games. There was so much creativity that came out of that. It was really kind of Tezica and, you know, all of his staff members handing the keys to the creative keys. kingdom to everyone and saying, now you can be us. And people really delivered. And, you know, that forced Tessica and his teams to up their game because they said, you know, it seems like everyone has made every kind of Mario level and experience possible because of Mario Maker. What is there left for us to do? And they came up with stuff like Mario Odyssey. And it turned out that there were still good things to be done, creative ideas to be explored.

the Mario well is surprisingly deep. Yeah, I love that series, and I hope it's not withered on the vine because it has been eight years since Mario Maker 2. And that one proved that you don't need two screens to make the idea work and had a really great single player mode as well. So I really hope that there's more of that in the future. I mean, they have a console now where the controller can double as a mouse. To me, that seems like it was made for Mario Maker or a Mario Maker type experience.

experience every bit as much as the Wii U was with its game pad. Yeah. I just feel like if they don't do it, what are they doing? But, you know, then again, they waited until Switch to bring out Virtual Boy instead of putting it on 3DS. So they do things in their own time. I'm still holding on hope for the Zelda Maker. I'm still holding up for that one.

Well, I guess they patched in Zelda and Mario Maker 2, I think. There's a mode where you can play a Zelda and he has unique ability. Sorry, Link. He has unique abilities, the bow, the bomb, et cetera, and you can build levels around that. And that's really cool. I did not know about that. Yeah. It was a later patch that happened after I stopped playing.

But then I jumped back in, and it's really neat. Hmm. I had no idea. I need to learn more about that. So anyway, Takashi Tezika, amazing game designer, a legend of the industry, someone who shaped so many of our not only childhoods, but also kind of gave me a career. me a career. I've been writing about his games for 25 years. And, you know, when I was, when I was in the trenches in the Games Press doing reviews, I always loved to tackle a game, which even if I didn't know, that was produced or designed or directed or supervised by Tezica.

Like, I just, I saw those coming from Nintendo and thought, I'm going to abuse my power here, and I'm going to take the review on this because it just looks like an experience that I'm going to love. And he very, very rarely let me down. There are a few games on the CV where I'm like, hmm, yeah, could have lived without that one. But, you know, if we're just going on percentages here, we're still talking like a 0.995 batting average. Did I get that right, Diamond? Did I do the baseball thing correctly there? I mean 1.00 is like perfect, right?

Yeah, yeah, in theory, yes. Okay. So I feel confident in this. Yeah, I would say like for me as well, he is the reason why I'm here today, why I still make a living writing about games and podcasting about games. Because, you know, I thought games were fine until I play Mario Brothers, Super Mario Brothers. That lit my brain on fire. I thought at that point, my life is about video games now. All toys can go to hell.

I'm about video game cartridges. And yes, and then just we were talking about this man's career and everything he worked on. It just is, I can't think of anyone offhand outside of like Miyamoto, who he worked in and him with, was such a stellar career. And I did want to read like a brief quote from Imamura who commented on the departure of Tezica. He tweeted about it. And this really sums up like who he was as a person. So this is by the creator of the Starfrock series, worked on a lot of other stuff in Nintendo for over 30 years. he says, from the time I joined the company until my own resignation, you really took care of me for such a long time.

Even though you're such a great person, you're always approachable and down to earth. So I think our outsider perspective on Tezica is pretty accurate. Yeah, he just seems so, I mean, he's exactly the kind of guy you would associate with creating so many wonderful experiences. He just feels like these games are good and fun because he wants people to have a good time. And again, I just don't get a sense of ego about it. It's, you know, like people he works with talking about like, oh, yeah, you came up with this amazing idea. This was, this was, you know, revelatory for us. It changed everything.

And he's like, oh, I did that. It's not something he like holds on to and says, do you know who I am? That doesn't seem like the Tesiga way. He's not like David Cage out there. I don't think I've ever said on the podcast, which game developer has actually said that to me. But it's probably not the one people would expect. Oh, okay. It was not Tezega.

I can tell you that. It was the cave story guy, right? No, he's just as nice as Tezegah. I figured. I figured. Yeah, he's, I miss that guy. I met him a few times, and then he kind of just fell off the face of the earth, which is a shame. But Tezica hopefully will not fall off the face of the earth.

Hopefully he'll still kind of stick around in the public light, be a little more, you know, a little visible. But he doesn't necessarily seem to go in for that. So maybe not. Maybe what we have is just a phenomenal body of work. And I'd be okay with that. So it's a little bit of a shorter episode than usual, but it just seemed like we needed to strike while this iron is hot. And again, you know, pay tribute to. to someone who kind of in some ways is the reason this podcast exists and has managed to sustain

itself all this time. He's given us so much great content to talk about. I hate to use the word content. It's better than that. It's not just content. It's games. It's experiences. It's, you know, breathtaking, wonderful new ideas.

Joy and satisfaction. Yes. And I respect the hell out of that and appreciate the hell out of that. So thank you, Mr. Tesica, for all. of your hard work, and I hope that you enjoy the ever-loving hell out of your retirement. I hope it's awesome for you. No NFTs. Please.

No AI. Please. He doesn't have to work on rare apes. He created the defining ape. He worked on Donkey Kong. If he does, we take it all back. All right. Any final thoughts before we round off?

No, I think I said it best within the first 10 seconds, more like Takashi Bazuka. So that's all. I just wanted to reiterate that. I would welcome our Discord members to discuss for the next 30 years or so. Which Retronaut is the Tesika of Retronauts? Go ahead. Sorry. All right.

So this is a public-facing episode, which means that you, the listener, may have wandered in by mistake and said, Wow, what is this cool thing talking about a guy whose games I love? Well, congratulations. You have heard the 773 episode of Retronauts. That's actually not true. We've made many more than that, but formally, this is 773. That means there's a whole heck of a lot of Retronauts out there for you to listen to and catch up on. You can get started now, and you'll probably catch up around the time we hit a thousand.

So please check us out at Retronauts.com or on just about any podcast streaming, broadcasting service besides Spotify. We are out there. I guess we're not on YouTube, and we should be. I really should do something about that. But you can find us pretty easily, and you can support this podcast and make more episodes like this happen. Get us to a thousand. Get us over that finish line by checking out patreon.com slash retronauts where we are a listener-supported podcast. We have a few ads, but they don't bring in that much.

It's really listeners who make it possible for us to gather together, talk about video games, go to events and present in public. and still be able to buy groceries. So thank you for that. We are greatly appreciative if you are a subscriber. If you're not, again, patreon.com slash retronauts. We offer all kinds of cool incentives beyond just we talk about video games. So check those out. There's some great stuff to be had, including weekly columns by the person who is about to

introduce themselves and tell you where you can find more of the. There are things on the Internet in addition to Retronauts. Oh, I hope he's talking about me. I think he is talking about me. Yes, Diamond Fight. Hello. I am a freelance writer, but I do a lot of that writing for Retronauts. And yes, we have weekly columns, and we have monthly community podcast, and we have Discord access.

And you can get all of that for $5 a month at Patreon.com searchnotes. But otherwise, you can find me anywhere on the Internet by looking for Fight Club. F-E-I-T is my last name. C-L-U-B. That's a place I would like to hang out with Mr. Tesica at. And yeah, Fight Club, social media or fightclub. Me is my lo-fi website. And, yeah, it's funny that we would record this same week that I write about a column,

I write a column about New Super Mario Brothers, which is very much a Texca-led game, in a way. And also, who else do we have here? That's right. We introduce ourselves, so it's Bob. Bob's going to tell you how to find Bob on the internet. Sure. Hey, it's Bob. And you can find me on places like Blue Sky and Letterbox, says Bob Servo. My other podcast is Talking Simpsons. Check that out wherever you find podcast or go to patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. We've got a ton of stuff there, including episode series about Futurama and King of the Hill and many, many other great cartoons. Thank you. And finally, you can find me, Jeremy Parrish, here on Retronauts. You can also find me on my YouTube channel talking about Nintendo and Sega and so forth video games, chronological. ologically, many, many games developed by Mr. Tezica, as well as many developed by Yuji Naka.

It's a panoply of creative talent there. I also do stuff at Limited Run Games, and you can find me popping up here and there in, like, liner notes and magazine columns. It's, you never know where I'm going to pop up. I'm like that bad penny, but I like to think of myself as more like a lucky dime. Anyway, this has been Retronauts, episode 773, saying farewell to Mr. Tezica, not in a bad way, in a positive, happy way, because he's retiring, and that's great. So thanks everyone for listening. And Mr. Tezica, we'd like to say so long, and thanks for all the Cheep Cheeps. Good night.

I'm sorry, I laugh so hard because I get from time to time video game people in my Facebook feed just because, because. I guess I know someone who knows someone. You know, I guess, you know, obviously I live, you know, in Osaka, and I know people in Kyoto, so like these people probably know each other or whatever. And just, just this morning, I got jump scared like, do you know Yujinaka? I was like, I don't know Yuji Nakka.