Retronauts - Retronauts Micro 65: Farewell, Genyo Takeda

Episode Date: July 14, 2017

Chris Kohler and Jose Otero join Jeremy and Bob to mark the impending retirement of Nintendo veteran Genyo Takeda, one of the most tenured game creators still working. From EVR Racer to StarTropics to MMC tech, a freeform discussion of a gaming legacy.

This week in Retronauts, it's a retirement party. Hi, everyone, and welcome to Retronauts. Hi, everyone, and welcome to Retronauts Micro. That's right, Micro. This is a mini episode, even though it's kind of structured like a real episode. I own Jeremy Parrish. And with me this week, to celebrate retirement is... Chris Kohler, features editor of Kotaku.

Ooh, that sounds weird. You've never done that before. I know that's really weird. I'm still getting used to that, huh? Yep, yep, yeah. All right. You? Jose Otero editor at IGN?

Okay, that's the same. Uh-huh. Hey, I'm retiring. I'm Bob Takeda on me, Mackey. What? Take on me. Oh, my goodness. There we go.

You were working on, and you were holding this. I was writing that in the bathroom, so you're welcome. That was what you were doing. Yes. All right. So Bob gave away the big surprise. Hey, it's in the title of the episode. People know.

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He recently announced at an investor's meeting, I believe, that he, yes, he is retiring, and it's kind of a big deal. He's been there forever. Is he, like, the most tenured person at Nintendo now? He's up there. Is he the most tenured person in the video games industry now? Oh, my goodness. Only if Gunpei Yokoi had still been in Nintendo and not died, would he be the, uh, He would beat Takeda, I think, was getting, uh...

Yeah, he came in under... Sure. I... Under Yokoi. Yeah. And, yeah, if, if Hiroshi Yamauchi hadn't died, he'd also be more tenured. But I mean, like game designers, not, uh... But I mean, Yamuchi left.

And, and, you know, I mean, Gumpai Yoko, he actually did... He did not go out of Nintendo in a, you know, behind box. He quit. Oh, that's true. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so possibly, and if not, don't, don't at me. No, actually, I'm curious.

to know. Is there someone who has been at Nintendo longer than Takeda? 80-year-old accountant who won't go home. Well, again, I tell this story a lot, but the first, you know, back in the year 2002, when I waltzed in like a big, dumb foreigner

writing to Nintendo's old playing cards building, there was a little old man in that in the lobby of the playing cards building that yelled at me to get out. And that dude, he might have been working at Nintendo for a long time. He might still be there.

Yeah, but this is custom, right? Like, remember the board of directors, you have to sort of say, okay, I'm retiring, and here's my replacement, which they said was the guy under him, a co-Chiota. Shioda, I may be mispronouncing that, but that's sort of his partner in arms at Nintendo. Okay. So why is it a big deal that Genio Takeda is retiring?

Why are we having an episode about a guy retiring? Star Tropic. I mean, come on, Nintendo's best game. Punch out? We're getting warmer? Well, I think it's just the fact that who else has been in the games industry as long as Genio Takeda. And he's had his hands on a lot of really big projects, but also, you know, because he has risen in the ranks at Nintendo, he's just been a key figure in one of the biggest games company for as long as the games industry has existed.

45 years. He came to Nintendo in 1972. That is a long time. So I just feel like this is pretty remarkable and probably deserves to be remarked upon. For sure. Let us remark. Yes. Chris, have you ever interviewed together?

No, and now that he finally left Nintendo, maybe one day he'll get the chance. Yeah, when did he stop working in actual game design? It's been a while, right? You're holding the notes. I want to say he helped maybe, God, I want to say Super Punchout, maybe he like oversaw that with his protege with the guy who directed Punchout for NES. But he could have been just on some random Wii channel thing or something like that. I mean, I know he directed the first official video game that Nintendo ever made, like, first arcade game, I think.

Yeah, it was a mechanical game, right? That was, like, very, you know, just in Nintendo's practices, just like not the most efficient piece of technology, I would say. Like, it kept breaking down, and he had a lot of servicing. It was based on, like, a weird use of technology and video imaging. Yeah, and I crack the books on Takeda for the Punchout episode. That's right. You should listen to that, kids. Oh, thank you.

But, I mean, that's where Punchout came from because the video thing was too unreliable, so they're like, let's pretend its video, and that's sort of how it came into being. But this is Jeremy's episode, so sorry. No, that's fine. Flesh this out. I didn't, like, you know, put down a lot of hard research into this. No, no, go ahead. I mean, I would like for this to be more kind of like an organic conversation. I mean, I've said all these things on the Punchout episode.

That was like eight months ago. But, yeah, EVR race was Nintendo's first arcade game. It was a video-based game using an now obsolete format. which you place bets on either cars or horses depending on the model or whatever and it would switch to different video tracks so it would be randomized and I don't know if you would actually win money or you were just choosing for fun. I've seen the I've seen a picture of the unit but I don't know actually how it functions. Yeah, it was based around kind of a similar like technological premise to Wild Gunman, right? I think so. Yeah. Like the original projection system that would change

to different video tracks depending on whether you shot a dude or he shot you. I don't know the technological basis for a while it's coming, but I'm guessing it could be that EVR format, which was used briefly in the least again. If you want to see this thing, like Google it, but it'll show up on before Mario.com. They have a bunch of photos of it.

Evr race accommodated one to ten players, which was insane, although the picture they had on the site, I think, was only five. But there's just fun facts like that. You should totally check out. But he kind of came up pretty quickly through the ranks, I think, and, I mean, you know, like a decade

after he joined Nintendo, he was running his own division. And I know we've talked about this, but basically once Nintendo started getting into video games and, you know, launched their home console, the Famicom, they kind of restructured internally and created divisions. So there were like basically four R&D divisions. I think there was always R&D 1, but then, you know, R&D 2 came along and then R&D 3. And then when, you know, after Donkey Kong, Miyamoto, Shigero Miyamoto, was given a new division, R&D4, which eventually became Entertainment Analysis Division, EAD, which... Now is entertainment analysis and development, that's it.

That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, which now has a different name again because they've restructured. They merged everything. Yes, yes. Yeah, I mean, they re kind of compiled their internal structure in 2002 or so. Yeah. But, you know, kind of during the classic era, the NES era, the Super NES era, they worked with these divisions. And, you know, R&D1 was like Game Boy and portable systems.

R&D2 was the, no one, we don't really talk about R&D2. What was R&D2? Was R&D2 his division? No. He worked, Uweimura, the guy who created, designed the Famicom. That's right. was R&D2's head. And then Takeda was put in charge of R&D3.

What did EAD become? R&4 was EAD, right? Right. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, like EAD was R&D's name later. And for our listeners, EAD, Mario and Zelda teams, basically, right? Yeah, basically, it kind of sounds like once a person kind of, you know, proved themselves

and became super instrumental in Nintendo success, they were given their own division. because you started with Yokoy, an R&D1, and he was like the old guard guy who put Nintendo on the map in the first place, we know with Ultrahand. And then Uymura came over from, I want to say, Sharp and helped design the TV consoles that Nintendo launched in 1975.

Then Taketa was put in charge of R&D3 after kind of proving his merit with arcade games and stuff, and then Miyamoto was given R&D4 once Donkey Kong exploded. And R&D, too, which I just looked at, this was Uyamura's division, and this was really more focused on not only like technology, but like system operating software and technical support, says Wikipedia. So their list of games, which exists, is very short. They did mock writer and ice hockey, and then it's like they did like, they did Sute Haqoon, and then they did all the porting for the Mario Advance games on Game Boy Advance. It's just a very, very small list.

Okay. Okay. Oh, yeah, that's right. But they did the Mario games. And now that group has become kind of its own group at Nintendo. Well, it was merged into Nintendo SPD, which was merged into EAD. And I still feel, is it called E.P. What is the new?

EPD, I think so. Yeah, it's EPD. I used to put an extra E on it. But, yeah, it's, uh, don't know what the agreement said. Oh, God, I forget. I really missed the pre-2003 Nintendo divisions. Yeah. I knew them and I knew what they made.

Now it's just like, yes. Well, now that, I mean, now the point is they finally, eliminated the last vestige of Yamauchi's basically like feudal lord system in which all the divisions competed with each other and didn't know what the other divisions were doing and kept technological secrets from each other. And so Nintendo has finally cut all that out and now there's one hardware development group. Because again, like the portable and the home systems were developed by different groups. Yeah, so they finally eliminated one hardware group, one software group at the end. Right.

So, anyway, Takeda kind of rose to prominence within this feudal structure and became R&3's daimyo, more or less. Yeah, precisely. So, yeah, R&D3 was more software focused than R&D2. Maybe not as quite as software focused as, you know, R&D4. Like, I don't think Miyamoto's division ever worked on anything that wasn't just software. Like, that was what they did. They did not, as a general rule, no, they did not do hardware. Whereas Takeda's group was kind of.

of mostly focused on software, but sometimes they came up with things that helped make their software better. And that ended up being really instrumental in the success of the NES and really shaped kind of the direction that hardware took outside the U.S., or outside of Japan, where Nintendo had a much tighter leash on software development and especially on licensees. Takeda's group came up with the memory mapper chip scheme, which, basically, basically made NES games capable of being interesting and functional and worth playing after 1986 or so when, you know, the hard limits of the basic NES cartridge capabilities and the basic hardware capabilities of the system itself were sort of, you know, kind of hit the wall. Yeah, and other things he developed, I pulled up my punchout notes as a refresher.

I have down here the backup battery, the analog control on the N64, and he was a key developer of the Wii, which we talked about in our Wii episodes. And that backup battery was so important for Zelda, right? Like, could we have gotten Zelda without it? It would have been very different. It would have been a password system, and it would have been terrible. Yeah, so important for just game design in general. Yeah, absolutely. Just, like, being able to save your progress without a password.

That Japan experienced Zelda, and there were load times. You had to, like, flip over the disc. It's not that bad, though. It's really not that bad. Yeah. I've played it on through, I've played all the way through it on Famicom Disc System. And it's not that bad. It's not like, it's not like Simon's Quest, where if you go left from the first town, you have to flip the disc, or you don't

flip the disc, but you have to load. And then, like, you know, there's these two werewolves who come at you in the swamp immediately to the left of the first town. That's right. And if you get hit by the werewolves who fire projectiles at you as soon as you show up on screen, you'll get hit and fly back

off screen into town. And then there's another like 10 second load time. So that's bad. Zolda's not that bad. Okay. But the battery backup allowed people to plug in their cartridge, press it down, press the power, button and it jumped in

press start. There's a title screen, a save select screen, you press start again and you're playing as opposed to doing all that and then punching in a 64 digit password with ambiguous characters and upper and lowercase letters and who can forget

Metroid and the awful font that was chosen. Metroid wasn't even that bad. I mean, that was a fairly compact He still got it wrong from time to time. You did. But I was thinking more like Fazzanidu or something where it's just like Like, that font was bad. All the seraphs?

Those passwords were, like, yeah, they were like so long. Didn't every letter have, like, nine seraphs on it? So, like, what am I even looking at here? Yes, basically. So, you know, people still used passwords because it was cheaper to incorporate a password into your game than to incorporate SRAM and a battery. But, you know, for Nintendo first-party games, it made a lot of sense because they were the ones, you know, holding the purse strings.

That was their own manufacturing process. So they were kind of like, yeah, let's just. just put a battery in here and it made their games just like you can just jump right in and play and you know with Zelda that meant you know no matter how long you played no matter how far into the game you'd gotten

you could always just save the game when you were done. You died, okay you hit save, you're frustrated and disgusted with the game you don't want to write down a password you're depressed because you lost at the seventh dungeon again so yeah it just made the games more playable

more approachable. You also said the analog stick right? For the N64 Yeah, I know. There's another really important piece of technology. I mean, I feel, although, I mean, was there anything like it before that? There had been analog controllers, sure. Yeah. And, and, you know, the battery backup had been used in pinball machines to save high scores, right?

So, I mean, it's not like they came out of pole cloth, but it's like the idea of let's apply this. I mean, no less impressive to say, yeah, exactly, to say, let's put this in every video game cartridge we sell. I mean, that's, you know, that's a smart thing to do. kind of the theme of his career. I mean, even being involved heavily in like the Wii, for example, which was like Nintendo's moment of, hey, we're not going to follow where technology is going. Instead, we're going to work on power consumption, make it smaller, make it more efficient, and we're not going to blow the doors off with graphics like everyone else is going for. That's the same thing with punchouts. Like, we could make a

laser disc game, but we'll make a much cheaper version that we don't have to maintain that will have the same effect on people. It's just these cheaper solutions, I think. Yeah, I think it's interesting. Never in my life, by the way, have I seen a punchout machine in Japan. I mean, a lot of this is like you don't actually see a lot of old Japanese arcade machines in Japan, period, just because, you know, I mean, there's not a lot of room in Japan, so they tend to get rid of a lot of this stuff. But, I mean, I really have never, ever seen a punchout in Japan.

I'm not saying I didn't release it there. They did. But, like, just never saw one. NCL's hanging out to all of them. Like, everyone else, too bad. Well, most of what you see in Japan now are... They're the standardized, you know, like, like, Astro City, whatever, you know, sit-down cabinets. Yeah, and they put games that would go into those cabinets and then put them in those cabinets.

Punch-out, since it requires the dual-monitor setup, doesn't slot easily into, you know, any existing cabinets. Yeah, but even Punch-Out and that dual-monitor setup, just the problem to solve being, hey, we have too many monitors left over. Let's do something. Please use these for something, anything. Yeah, very smart. And caller number nine for one million dollars, Rita, complete this quote, Life is like a box of Chocolate

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That is the Nintendo way. It's interesting that, you know, you talked earlier, Chris, about the feudal lord system and how there was like a left-hand, right-hand failure to communicate within Nintendo's divisions. But I do think it's interesting that a lot of what Takeda did during the NES era was to make someone else's hardware design more viable. Sure. I mean, besides the battery backup, again, you had the MMC, the MNC, the MES era. memory mapper chips, and those were essential to making the Famicom and NES viable beyond kind of like their basic hardware level because they allowed basically a paging system

where you could, it was kind of like putting multiple game ROMs together. The NES could only look at so much at a time, but, you know, this much of a game, like, you know, is a very small amount. You can have Super Mario Brothers in there if you really squeeze. But anything more complex than that, there's just no room. But the memory mapper chips allowed you to have, like, a page that was the size of Super Mario Brothers. And then you flipped a page, and there's another game code chunk, the size of Super Mario Brothers. And so you just keep adding those, and it switches over.

And all of a sudden, you know, instead of having a one-page book, you've got a novel, basically. Yeah, I must have made those programmers really happy. I'll say that. I'm sure it did. I mean, I think, you know, the Femi-Com disk system was designed to sort of address that problem. to give people more capacity, but then they came up with a memory mapper chip scheme and all of a sudden the Famicom disk system wasn't really necessary and it was also really easy to pirate.

Yeah. And the disks had a limited capacity so it was larger but as soon as cartridges passed that the disc was behind and they couldn't do anything by the disc. So people were like, why didn't the disk system ever come to the US? Well that's because by the time it would have made sense to bring it over. It didn't make sense anymore. It already moved on. Like cartridges were better and that's because of the memory mapper system.

It's funny that you talk about these groups working in isolation. It explains Star Tropic's to be perfectly. It's like this team is making their own Zelda with an arcade sensibility. It's not the Zelda sensibility. So it is a Zelda-ish game, but it's like really punishing and requires like really good reflexes. And I hate it, but I want to love it so much or so much about that game I want to love. But it's one of the like two or three games he's directed, maybe four games. He's directed four games.

Yeah, like two arcade punchout games, Mike Tyson's punchout and Star Tropic. Oh, also pro wrestling. Oh, pro wrestling? He worked on that. I think that was kind of a collaborative venture with a company called Try, which eventually became human entertainment. Okay, cool, yeah. But I feel like he was always rooted in that arcade world with his game design. So I can definitely see that with Star Tropic's for sure.

And, God, I love that game, but I also hate it. Yeah. Well, I think it's interesting that, I mean, one of the reasons I wanted to talk about Takeda is because his games have more than anyone who I think has ever worked at Nintendo internally, his games have the most sort of like Western mentality, the Western appeal. I'm guessing what happened was something along the lines of Nintendo of America is like, hey, this game will do really well for us in the West. Can we get a game like this? And Nintendo's like, well, Miyamoto's not going to make it. And the other game development division under Yoko, they're not going to make it.

So we're going to give it to R&D 3. And they'll make your game for you, America. Boy likes making things that are Japanese weird, but we want Western weird. So let's give it to Takeda. Right. Yeah. I mean, basically, like, they were just like, okay, yeah, you guys do it. I mean, I'm kind of like, this is my head cannon.

But there's probably a reason for that. Everybody else is probably just busy. Yeah. But kind of one of the weird side effects or interesting side effects is that I think because, you know, this group did come up with all the memory mapper chips. Like some of their games use memory mapper schemes that no other games on NES ever did. Yeah. Punchout uses 80s.

unique chip. It's only used in Punch Out and Mike Tyson's Punch Out called the MMC2, which allows, like, I think, more and bigger sprites or something like that. Right. I can't remember exactly like. Well, that was the, well, that way, I mean, that was essentially like, they couldn't bring Punch Out the arcade game over to the NES as is, but I think they looked at it and they said, okay, well, what can we have and what can we lose? Do we need a big little Mac, you know, character on screen with wireframes? No, it's really not necessary. Do we need a two monitor thing? No. Do we need a two monitor thing? No. Do we need big, expressive boxer characters?

Yes. And so it was like, we need to do that. So if that means it have to have... And maybe they envision this chip being used later on down the line. Yeah. But again, maybe like the disc system, it was just supplanted technologically very quickly. And it was like, oh, there's no reason to ever use this again. Yeah, I mean, they came up with the MMC3, which allowed for, you know, like the scoreboxes along the screens and non, like, two-directional scrolls.

and things like that. So all of a sudden, yeah, like the MMC 2 did some cool stuff, but the MMC3 was, you know, the next step and it was much more practical for what people wanted to do with their game. And it was a generalist sort of thing versus something that's like, it gives you big sprites. It's like, okay, well, unless you're gonna make a game that has like, you know, giant towering characters, you don't really need this. You mentioned Little Mac and he only exists in the NES version. He's not in the SNS version or the arcade games, but he's Little Mac because they couldn't

make him big, so they made him Little Mac. And I think that's just so ingenious. It's like, oh, he's a little guy. So there you go. That's your explanation. Like Mario before the mushroom. Yeah. It is.

I mean, that's the Nintendo way of design the game first and then write the story later based on what you had, what your design restraints were. Yeah. And then the other unique mapper chip that, uh, that, uh, that, uh, Takeda's games used was the MMC 6, which was actually just the MMC 3 plus battery backup. And it wasn't until I started reading about this, you know, this unique chip. That, you know, apparently is a little harder to emulate than the standard MMC3. I was like, well, wait a minute, you couldn't save games on MMC3s?

And I started looking and no. No MMC3 game has battery backup. If a game has battery backup, it's MMC4, which I realize this is like super, you know, minutia. Like, who really cares? But it is interesting because like these mapper technologies played a big part in kind of the design and capabilities and potential of NES games. And, you know, MNC3 was by far the most popular of the later NES cartridges, like everything. Super Mario Brothers 3, et cetera, were on MMC3. And I think, you know, maybe Super Mario Brothers 3 didn't have battery backup because the chip didn't exist for it.

Yeah. And until later. It's like, it's funny because if you, the more you start to learn about this stuff, the more you can start to figure out, okay, well, why was this game designed the way it was? Oh, it was literally because of the cost of parts, the availability of what using this part meant for, you know, you can't have a saved game. You know, so, yeah, yeah, it's really, it's fascinating. MMC6 is only used in the Star Tropic's games. Right. Oh, really?

Yeah. They're the only games of those style that can actually use battery backup. He had the direct line to Yamauchi. So literally all they had to do was get him drunk enough to say, okay, you can make a chip and use it on your only your own games. Like it's, and it's, you know, I don't know if I would go so far as to say, oh, and then he never shared it with anybody else. He wanted to keep it to himself. I see. Yeah, I would doubt that.

But to be able to make essentially to say a bespoke chip for these games, especially if the order is coming down from America saying, hey, you know, again, we really think Punch Out will be a world smashing success in America and it was. Or we need a game like Star Tropic that's something that's geared towards the American style of play. Yeah, I mean, Star Tropic never was released in Japan nor was it sequel. No. So those games must have done, the first game must have done well enough here. that they were, you know, justified in creating a sequel to it several years later. They were like, yeah, that was a hit. Let's make another one.

In terms of the idea is, like, did he share these ideas? Did he keep it to himself? Like, he was working on Star Tropic, while everyone else was working on Super Famicom stuff. So it's like, we don't need these chips. We're not going to make any more NES games. Like, just do whatever you want. So would you then say he was always at the tail end for a bit at Nintendo? Like, just behind in terms of what the new thing was?

Well, at this point, nope, there had never been a generational shift like this. And nobody really knew, like, the NES was so, so popular and made so much money in foreign territories. Nobody really knew, like, the 8-bit business. Like, is it just going to keep going? You know, are we going to shift over into 16-bit smoothly? Is 16-8-bit going to sit on the shelves together? Like, what are we going to do? So you did see Nintendo putting in a lot of resources into continuing to develop 8-bit games, even as the Super Famicom was coming out,

because there was no sense of this generational shift where, okay, we're going to wind this down, we're going to wind this up, and nobody really knew what was going to happen. As it turns out, 8-bit crashed and burned really fast. I wouldn't necessarily say that. I mean, I think if you look in kind of the wider spectrum, the most successful 8-bit systems lasted like 10 years. I mean, NES, Famicom, that was around for 11 years. The spectrum in the UK was around forever. Well, the market fell out really quickly.

I don't think it was an immediate collapse. I think it was kind of a transition. There was, if you look at, you know, like business type magazines and things like that at the time, there was definitely a sense that people expected 8-bit to be strong for longer than it was. I think they were hedging their bets, but also I think it was basically all hands on deck. Like, we finish Mario World and Zelda Link to the past. Like, all of our top guys are doing this for the next, like, three years. So, like, we're not going to see very much out of Nintendo itself outside of things like Kenya's, sorry, Takeda's division.

Yeah. Makes you hope that's the story today with 3DS and Switch, but I digress. It seems very much like R&D3 was, I don't know, I don't know what the metaphor is here, batting cleanup. You know what I mean? They were just like engaged to deliver the things that were necessary that other people weren't doing. They were team players. Yeah, it's like the team that's, you know, working on Hey, Pickman now. Like, it's not glorious, but kids are going to buy it.

It's going to make money for the company. So you got to suck it up and do it. Someone's got to employ Arzest. Not me. Our zest. Okay. So, anyway, is there anything else really to be said about Takeda? I feel like we kind of talked about the most essential things here.

So his last position on the passing away of Satorra Riywata when Nintendo sort of were like, what are we going to do for leadership here? I mean, he was one of the two members of Nintendo that was elevated in the position of fellow, Miyamoto being creative fellow and Takeda being technology fellow to advise President Kimmishima. And acting director for a little bit, right? He and Miyamoto share that role? They had that triad kind of thing going on.

But Kimi Shimah was also there doing that stuff as well. Sure. Yeah. I just hope we get a thorough hours-long interview with him because more than even Miyamoto, more than Tezuka, more than anyone, could he tell you about the history of Nintendo? I mean, he saw the company's transformation firsthand. He was there in the...

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Yes. I hope he talks and talks and talks. So we'll see. Yeah. And he's, if anything, like, I mean, we did mention heavily influenced, by Yo-Koi to the point that followed the same philosophy, the same virtues of like, hey, it's the application of the technology and not being on the bleeding edge of everything, right? And to an extent, that lives on in Switch. That is very much still the case.

I mean, Wii was the first Nintendo home console to adopt the Gumpi-Yokoi, you know, season technology concept. That was always built into the handhelds. But, yeah, like, the Wii was the first time that appeared in a home console and they said, you know what, let's not compete with some. Sony, you know, blow-to-blow, let's just do our own thing. And that was to Kedah coming in and, you know, he had a big part in shaping that direction and saying, like, we don't have to go HD yet. We don't have to have the most technologically impressive system. We can do something that's going to be different and appealing, and it'll be a success anyway. And they're right. Yeah, and it impacted everything, right? I mean, it impacted the hardware sales for sure.

It impacted the way the company was making games. I mean, they were trying very much to re-explain games to people. because they got a whole new audience in there that they didn't expect and know necessarily how to talk to. But they know how to talk to us. Sorry. Yeah. Hopefully they will talk to us. Hopefully, Takeda will talk to us.

Yeah. And we'll learn lots of cool little tidbits about Nintendo now that he's no longer under corporate lock and key. And, I mean, you know, geez, like, it's just, it's just nice. I'm trying to phrase this in the right way. It's nice to see people retire from Nintendo, like, before they're, I don't know, 80 years old. because, like, as much as I like Nintendo, as much as I think Shigeram Yamoto makes some pretty neat video games, the board of Nintendo right now, the youngest person on that board, I believe, is 44 years old. And the rest of it, you have this, I mean, and they, you know, anybody you talk to will tell you, oh, yeah, like, you know, anything Nintendo does,

you got to get it past this board of directors, and they are some old men. Like, Miyamoto is a sprightly young 63, yeah, like on that board. So, I mean, to see people, to see people saying, you know what, I think I'll retire instead of staying here until I am dust. Yeah, Cato's only 68, so he made it out in his 60s. He did, he did. And so maybe get some new young blood in there. Maybe a guy who's just in his 50s or something. Maybe somebody who just had his first grand kid can get in there and start literally making decisions as to, like, what Nintendo is going to do with a video game.

I mean, we've seen what young teams can do at Nintendo, like Splatoon. Like, that is their invention and they trust them and they made a hit. Like the leader on that team, though, is not that young, though, isn't he in his face? Right, right. He's young. They call it like the young. But it's not, well, it's less about, like, we made a video game and more about, like, you know, the making of big moves, you know, within the video game industry and, like, striking while

the iron is hot and doing what's going to, you know. Well, that's a completely separate issue. Striking while the iron is hot definitely seems to evade the tunnel constantly. But I do think that switch is part of that, too, right, that transition. Younger people involved, even. even for once you switch and all of its weirdness, like that was not made by old men. It was made by a younger guard.

So hopefully we'll continue to see that. You need to make, it's like, to be successful, it's like you need to make the radical changes before you have a huge bottoming out failure. But I feel like it's tough to convince a company like Nintendo. It's like you can get them to make radical change after they've like thoroughly face planted. And everybody goes, okay, old ways,

aren't working what's the new way. It's, but it's like they couldn't have done the switch coming off of the Wii. With the Wii U, the Wii U, the Wii U was there, you know, this extremely conservative thing that just did not, yeah, exactly. So, again. But what a library had. New blood, new blood in there, hopefully. All right, well, I don't want to belabor the point.

This is a quick and an efficient, tidy little episode, but I did want to sort of pay tribute to one of gaming's most enduring. and I think in a lot of ways important designers. And, yeah, I am looking forward to seeing someone who can step into Takeda's shoes, but I'm happy, as Chris said, that he is able to retire and hopefully enjoy many fruitful years of not working constantly at a corporation. What do you do with yourself after 50 years of that? I don't know.

Probably, like, go on vacation. Yeah, but then I mean, the first time in two decades. And a lot of people have ended up, you know, joining universities. That's true. And so I think that would be wonderful. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and I mean, that way he's passing on his experience to a younger generation directly. Yeah, I can see that happening.

That would be great. So anyway, good luck, Mr. Takeda, et cetera, et cetera. Good luck Nintendo. And Godspeed to all of us here at Retronauts. Anyway, I'm Jeremy Parrish. You can find me on Twitter as GameSpite. You can find Retronauts at Retronauts.com on the iTunes Music Store and on Podcast One's website and their app. You can also support us through Patreon, patreon.com slash Retronauts.

I think that's about it. Facebook, Twitter, yada, yada, yada. You know, the drill. Chris. My Twitter handle is Coboon Heath. That's K-O-B-U-N-H-E-A-T. So come and tell me all the things I got wrong. My Twitter handles at Jose underscore Otero, and you can find me on IGN.

And you can find Chris at Kotaku. Kotaku. There you go. Plug in. I've never heard of this website. Oh, hi, I'm Bob. You can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo. My other podcast is Talking Simpsons, a Chronological,

Exploration of the Simpsons every week. It's a new episode. We're going in order. At the time of this recording, we're towards the end of season five. Who knows what would be when this launches, but just go to Talking Simpsons. Or find Talking Simpsons in your podcast machine or app device or Victrola or something. I don't know. Do you guys release on Wax cylinders?

We're going to. That's going to be a Patreon tier. So look out for that. That's exciting. Shape them Bart Simpsons like footage. We got the Edison patent, so we're good. Talking Simpsons by Thomas. And we're going to electrocute an elephant in every episode.

Entire thing just goes on front. That's a bad idea. All right. That is it for this episode. We'll be back on Monday with a full episode. Very exciting. Please look forward to it. And call her number nine for one million dollars.

Rita, complete this quote. Life is like a box of... Uh, Rita, you're cutting out. We need your answer. Life is like a box of chocolate. Oh, sorry. That's not what we were looking for. On to caller number 10. Bad network got you glitched out of luck. Switch to Boost Mobile, super reliable, super fast nationwide network, and get four lines, each with unlimited gigs for just $100 a month. Plus get four free phones. Boost makes it easy to switch. Switching makes it easy to save.

The Mueller report. I'm Ed Donahue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House, if special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town. I guess from what I understand that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving of President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral.

Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officers started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. tremendous way to bear knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others the cops like brian don't shy away from it it's the very foundation of who they are and what they do the robbery suspect in a man police say acted as his lookout have been charged with murder i'm edonahue