Punching Out

Genyo Takeda, Nintendo’s first game designer, is calling it a day after 45 years

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Between Satoru Iwata’s sudden passing in July 2015 and Tatsumi Kimishima’s appointment as Nintendo’s fifth president two months later, Shigeru Miyamoto was the obvious choice to temporarily steer the ship. But alongside him was a man who, at the end of June, will bring down the curtain on a 45-year tenure at the company. Genyo Takeda may not be as famous as creatives such as Miyamoto, Takashi Tezuka or Eiji Aonuma, but he’s been equally crucial in shaping the direction of modern Nintendo.

Takeda was recruited by Gunpei Yokoi in 1972 and inducted into Nintendo’s R&D2 department, where he worked on a light gun shooting-range game called Laser Clay Shooting System. The (possibly apocryphal) story goes that Takeda saved the day when the first machine’s unveiling to the public went wrong. From behind the scenes, he controlled the game’s clay pigeons, registered each hit and tallied up the players’ scores manually, the illusion proving so convincing to punters that no one registered anything was amiss.

He moved into hardware design, heading up Nintendo’s third (and smallest) research and development team, while still developing software. Indeed, Takeda designed horse-racing arcade game EVR Race, considered to be the company’s first official foray into the videogame industry. Iwata and Miyamoto later credited him as “Nintendo’s first game designer”. Miyamoto and Takeda would go on to work together on several games, including 1979’s Sheriff and the original arcade version of