Nintendo Entertainment Analysis & Development

History

Nintendo Entertainment Analysis & Development grew out of Nintendo Research & Development 4 (R&D4), a new division established in 1983 following the success of Donkey Kong. Hiroshi Yamauchi, then Nintendo president, created R&D4 with Hiroshi Ikeda — a former president of Toei Animation who had risen through the ranks during the anime boom of the 1960s and 1970s — as general manager, and Shigeru Miyamoto as chief producer. The new unit was charged with developing software for the Family Computer, the home console Nintendo had launched in Japan on July 15, 1983. R&D4 immediately began work on the titles that would define its first decade.

The division's earliest years produced a run of games that are still played and studied today. Super Mario Bros. arrived in 1985, establishing platform conventions that tens of thousands of subsequent games would follow. The Legend of Zelda launched in 1986 alongside the Famicom Disk System, demonstrating that a home console game could sustain an open world and a continuous sense of exploration. Metroid followed the same year, introducing non-linear structure and an isolated atmosphere that influenced the design of every action-adventure game that came after it. All three were built within R&D4, all three under Miyamoto's supervision.

In 1989, Nintendo reorganized its internal development structure. R&D4 was spun off into its own independent division and formally renamed Nintendo Entertainment Analysis & Development. The division was divided into two departments: the Software Development Department, led by Miyamoto and responsible for game content; and the Technology Development Department, led by Takao Sawano — who had joined Nintendo in 1978 and was responsible for the design of the Famicom controller, the Famicom Disk System, and later the Nintendo 64DD — and responsible for programming tools and engine work. This structure gave EAD greater autonomy while keeping Miyamoto at the center of the creative process.

The Super Nintendo era saw EAD produce Super Mario World (1990), which launched as a pack-in title with the Super Famicom and remains one of the best-reviewed games in the Mario series. Super Mario Kart (1992) invented a genre — the kart racer — that would spawn hundreds of imitators. Star Fox (1993) used the Super FX chip to bring polygon rendering to the Super Famicom for the first time. F-Zero (1990), developed as a launch title for the Super Famicom, demonstrated Mode 7 scrolling in a way that still holds up visually. These were not incremental steps; each title proposed something new about what a video game could be.

The transition to Nintendo 64 required EAD to rethink every convention it had developed over the previous decade. Super Mario 64 (1996) — directed by Miyamoto himself, the last game he would fully direct — solved the problem of translating platform mechanics into three dimensions so thoroughly that its camera system and movement scheme became templates for nearly every 3D platformer that followed. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998), directed by Eiji Aonuma and produced by Miyamoto, applied the same 3D transformation to the Zelda formula, winning a level of critical recognition that few games of any era have matched. Both are regularly cited among the finest games ever made.

The GameCube generation brought EAD into new territory. Luigi's Mansion (2001) was a launch title that inverted the Mario formula, casting Luigi as a reluctant ghost-hunter armed with a vacuum. Pikmin (2001), conceived by Miyamoto during a walk in his garden, created an entirely new genre of real-time strategy softened by the emotional attachment players formed with their tiny followers. Animal Crossing arrived in Japan in 2001 and reached North America in 2002, establishing the concept of a game that ran on real-world time and rewarded players for simply showing up. These three titles alone demonstrated that EAD had not exhausted its capacity for invention.

By 2015, Nintendo's internal development structure had grown complex enough that consolidation became necessary. On September 16, 2015 — in a reorganization announced during the same period as the death of president Satoru Iwata — EAD merged with Nintendo Software Planning & Development to form Entertainment Planning & Development (EPD). The EAD name was retired after thirty-two years. The division it replaced had been responsible for some of the most played, most studied, and most imitated games in the medium's history, all built within a single studio operating quietly in Kyoto.