A pair of former Nintendo marketing leads predict that the Switch 2 generation will mark a seismic shift in the main creative forces behind the company's most beloved series.
During a new episode of their Kit & Krysta podcast, former Nintendo Minute hosts Kit Ellis and Krysta Yang talk about why "everything is about to change at Nintendo." While the arrival of a brand new console generation is obviously enough to change things pretty significantly, what the pair is actually referring to is much sadder.
Folks, I'll get straight to the point: some of the old guard at Nintendo is getting up there in age, and with console generations lasting around 7-8 years these days, there's a good chance many of them won't be with the company for the Switch 3, or whatever the next thing ends up being.
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"Several of the major developers at Nintendo who we have known for 40 something years are probably going to phase out of the company through retirement over this generation, assuming this lasts 7-8 years," predicts Ellis, who proceeds to run through a list of the some of the most influential Nintendo developers and their respective ages.
Ellis points out that Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of the Mario, Zelda, and Donkey Kong series, is currently 72 years old. "A lot of people at Nintendo, they retire at 65. He obviously has reasons to stick around, and they need him, and he obviously wants to work, but in eight years he will be 80 years old... getting up there."
Ouch.
Yoshio Sakamoto, known for the Metroid series, is 65. "He is right at that age," says Ellis, adding that Miyamoto's right-hand man Takashi Tezuka is 64. Meanwhile, the legendary Nintendo composer Koji Kondo is 63, the hosts point out. Eiji Aonuma, producer for the Zelda series, is 62; Kensuke Tanabe, the Metroid Prime series producer, is also 62, and Shin'ya Takahashi, Nintendo's head of planning and development, is 61.
"I'm not saying all of these people are going to be gone, but some number of them probably will be, so it's an open question of who's going to take these key leadership roles, not only within the gaming franchises that we know, but just within the company in general, there's going to be a natural, cultural change as new people take over these roles," Ellis says.
"It's going to feel different when these people exit the company because you just can't replace them," adds Yang. "You can teach the skill set, but you can't replace them as humans. It's just going to feel different. It may not mean that the games are going to be bad, it's just going to feel different."
Now that I'm lying in a puddle of my own tears, Ellis swoops in to save the day with some soundly reasoned optimism: actually, change can be good.
"There's a really good side of this too," Ellis says. "We get some different perspectives, we get some different thinking. It's just natural that there's going to be some sort of change that is happening with the company as all these new people come in and all of that NES/Famicom era starts to naturally cycle out."
OK, and now I'm back to crying. Yes, there's plenty of reason to be hopeful that new talent is learning under the careful stewardship of these legendary developers, and it's also reasonable to be excited for some fresh ideas, but I hadn't really confronted the fact that so many of the people behind franchises I've loved since early childhood are hitting retirement age this next console generation.
Ah well, in the wise words of Sheik from Ocarina of Time:
"The flow of time is always cruel. Its speed seems different for each person, but no one can change it... A thing that does not change with time is a memory of younger days."
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