Takashi Tezuka, one of the key Nintendo developers behind the earliest Super Mario and The Legend of Zelda games, is set to retire from his role as executive officer on June 26, 2026.
Nintendo listed the move in its personnel changes notice, published alongside its latest financial results. The announcement makes Tezuka's departure part of a wider boardroom change, with Takuya Yoshimura, Katsuhiro Umeyama and Keiko Akashi also retiring from their roles on the same date.
Tezuka's name is tied to some of the most important games Nintendo ever made. After early work on Punch-Out!!, he became part of the creative group around Shigeru Miyamoto and helped shape Super Mario Bros. before directing major follow-ups across Mario and Zelda.
Tezuka helped define Nintendo's classic era
Tezuka worked as a designer on the original Super Mario Bros. and directed The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. That run alone puts him at the center of Nintendo's transition from arcade-era success to home-console dominance.
His later work moved more toward production and supervision, including credits connected to Pikmin, Animal Crossing, Super Mario Maker and Super Mario 3D World. More recently, he was a producer on Super Mario Bros. Wonder, Nintendo's first fully new side-scrolling Mario game in more than a decade.
The timing also lands during a generational shift inside Nintendo. Other long-serving developers from the Famicom and Super Famicom years have stepped away recently, including Mario Kart veteran Hideki Konno and Metroid Prime producer Kensuke Tanabe. Miyamoto remains at Nintendo as an executive fellow, but his public role has increasingly stretched beyond games into films, theme parks and broader entertainment projects.
Nintendo is making several leadership changes
Nintendo's notice also names two new director candidates, Yutaka Takenaga and Chika Saka, subject to shareholder approval. Takenaga is senior director of the Auditing Department, while Saka has been selected as an outside director candidate.
The company did not frame Tezuka's retirement as a change to any specific game project. Still, his exit closes a major chapter for fans who read Nintendo credits closely. Tezuka's work runs through the foundations of Mario, Zelda, Yoshi and several modern Nintendo production lines, making this more than a routine executive reshuffle.
Nintendo is also moving through a busy business period around Switch 2, with financial results, hardware pricing updates and service changes all arriving as the company prepares for its next stretch of first-party releases. Tezuka's retirement does not alter those plans on its own, but it underlines how much of Nintendo's modern future is now being handed to the generation that followed its most famous 1980s creators.