Background During the 1970s, when Nintendo was still predominantly a toy company, it decided to expand into
interactive entertainment and the
video game industry. Several designers were hired to work under the Creative Department, which, at the time, was the only game development department within Nintendo. Among these new designers were
Makoto Kano, who went on to design various
Game & Watch games, and
Shigeru Miyamoto, who would create various Nintendo franchises. In 1972, the department was renamed to Research & Development Department; it had about 20 employees. The department was later consolidated into a division and separated into three groups,
Nintendo R&D1,
R&D2 and
R&D3.
1980–1989: Creation as Research & Development 4 's
Donkey Kong arcade game was a deciding factor in the creation of Nintendo R&D4. Circa 1983, Hiroshi Imanishi oversaw the creation of Research & Development No. 4 Department (commonly abbreviated to Nintendo R&D4), as a new development department dedicated to developing video games for home consoles, complementing the other three existing departments in the
Nintendo Manufacturing Division. Imanishi appointed Hiroshi Ikeda, a former director at
Toei Animation, as general manager of the newly created department, and Miyamoto as its chief producer. Also hired were
Takashi Tezuka and Kenji Miki, graphic designers, Minoru Maeda, a designer, and
Koji Kondo,
Akito Nakatsuka, and
Hirokazu Tanaka, all sound designers. Ikeda's creative team had many ideas, but lacked the programming skills to put them into action.
Mario Bros., one of the unit's first games, required assistance in this regard from
Gunpei Yokoi and R&D1. Toshihiko Nakago was familiar with the chipset for the
Family Computer, Nintendo's contemporary home console, as he was originally hired to work with
Masayuki Uemura's
Nintendo R&D2 to develop
software development kits for Nintendo consoles. When R&D2 and Systems Research and Development, Nakago's company, began porting R&D1-developed arcade games to the Famicom, Shigeru Miyamoto lured him and SRD to R&D4 to help develop
Excitebike. Following the release of
Excitebike, R&D4 developed a Famicom port of the
beat 'em up arcade game
Kung-Fu Master, called
Spartan X in Japan and
Kung Fu everywhere else. The game improved on features introduced in
Donkey Kong, representing a key step in the life of the
platform game genre. Their next game was
Super Mario Bros., a self-developed sequel to
Mario Bros. The game standardized many aspects of the
platform genre, and went on to be a critical and commercial success. Developed concurrently, but released a year later, was
The Legend of Zelda, an action adventure game. The phenomenal sales of
Mario and
Zelda made Miyamoto a household name, The division was comprised into two departments: the
Software Development Department, which focused on video game development and was led by Miyamoto, and the Technology Development Department, which focused on programming and developing tools and was led by Takao Sawano. The technology department relied on R&D2 engineers who assisted SRD with
software libraries. Following the release of
F-Zero, the first video game fully programmed by EAD, they collaborated with
Argonaut Software to develop the
Super FX, a chip which, when placed in Super Famicom cartridges, enabled the use of 3D graphics. As 3D gaming became more prominent, so, too, did the department, programming several of Nintendo EAD's 3D games with SRD. In 1997, Miyamoto explained that about twenty to thirty employees were devoted to each Nintendo EAD title during the course of its development, and that SRD was a company within the division, formally Nintendo R&D2's software unit, and was composed of about 200 programmers. Tezuka became deputy general manager, and
Eiji Aonuma, Konno, Shimizu,
Tadashi Sugiyama, and
Katsuya Eguchi became producers overseeing their own development teams. Keizo Ota and Yasunari Nishida were appointed project managers of their own groups in the Technology Development Department. In 2013, Eguchi was promoted to Department Manager of both Software Development Departments in Kyoto and Tokyo. As such, he left his role as Group Manager of
Software Development Group No. 2, and was replaced by
Hisashi Nogami. On June 18, 2014, the EAD Kyoto branch was moved from the Nintendo Central Office to the
Nintendo Development Center in Kyoto. The building housed more than 1100 developers from all of Nintendo's internal research and development divisions, which included the Nintendo EAD,
SPD,
IRD and
SDD divisions. On September 16, 2015, during a restructuring overshadowed by the recent death of president
Satoru Iwata, EAD merged with
Nintendo Software Planning & Development, forming
Entertainment Planning & Development (EPD). ==Structure==