Retiring? Tezuka Says He'll Keep Making Nintendo Games

When Nintendo's May financial results listed Takashi Tezuka among departing executive officers, the internet did what the internet does: assumed the worst. The man who directed Super Mario World and A Link to the Past, who's been at Nintendo since 1984, was retiring. Forty-two years, done. Except he isn't.

During Nintendo's 2026 shareholder meeting on Thursday, Tezuka took the microphone himself and confirmed he would continue at the company as a production producer. He's stepping down from the executive board, yes. His term expired. But he's not leaving the building, and he's not done making games.

Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa set it up first, telling shareholders that Tezuka "has been involved since the days of Famicom software" and "will continue to be involved in development moving forward." Then Tezuka spoke for himself. "Looking back on 42 years, my feeling is 'that was such enjoyable work,'" he said, via machine translation of notes from X user @NStyles, who attended the meeting. He reflected on the shift from hand-making games that "weren't available in toy stores" to working at a scale where "there's the joy of creating together with many people." He closed by confirming his new role and was met with loud applause from shareholders.

I wrote about this story yesterday when the retirement framing was still the dominant narrative, and I'm glad the correction came straight from Tezuka himself. Nintendo's original wording in May was ambiguous, enough so that an investor at the meeting specifically asked him to address it. The confusion was entirely avoidable. A single sentence in that May filing clarifying his continued involvement would have saved everyone the speculation. Nintendo's habit of saying as little as possible in corporate communications is a feature, not a bug, for the company, but this is a case where the silence created a false story that ran for weeks.

What a Production Producer Does

The title "production producer" might sound vague in English, but as VGC noted, in Japan it's a term commonly used in anime to describe someone who works between the creative and financial sides of a project, overseeing day-to-day content creation. It's a hands-on role. If anything, shedding the executive officer responsibilities frees Tezuka from boardroom obligations and lets him focus on the actual work of making games. His most recent credited project was Super Mario Bros. Wonder, and at 65, he's at Nintendo's typical retirement age. But his longtime collaborator Shigeru Miyamoto is still active at 73 as executive fellow, so there's clearly precedent for senior creators staying involved well past the usual threshold.

What struck me about Tezuka's speech was the tone. This wasn't a farewell. He talked about 3D, stereoscopic visuals, and motion controls with the enthusiasm of someone who still gets excited by new technology. "I truly feel that working for this company was the right choice," he said. That line, combined with the explicit commitment to keep producing, paints a picture of someone who chose to step away from corporate governance, not from game development.

The rest of the shareholder Q&A was, by multiple accounts, far less satisfying. When an investor asked about Nintendo's stance on generative AI, Furukawa reportedly pivoted to talking about protecting Nintendo's own IP from AI infringement rather than addressing whether the company would use the technology itself. A question about bringing games like WarioWare to mobile was answered with a reference to Pikmin Bloom. Classic Nintendo deflection.

The Nintendo Switch 2, priced at £395.99 in the UK, launches soon, and having Tezuka still actively involved in development during a hardware transition matters. He's one of the few people at Nintendo who has been through every single console generation the company has produced. Losing that institutional knowledge from the development floor would have been a real blow, even if the executive board can function without him.