Genyo Takeda

Genyo Takeda (竹田 玄洋) is the "Technology Fellow" of Nintendo and former general manager for Nintendo's Integrated Research Division, a position he held from its founding in 1981 until the unit was merged with the System Development Division in 2015 to form Nintendo Platform Technology Development. Takeda's unit was small, yet very important to Nintendo. Mostly IRD made hardware improvements to the consoles, but also developed a few games as well, all of which were produced by Takeda.

Takeda was born March 7, 1949 in Osaka, Japan. From an early age, he developed a fascination with hand-crafted items, but later graduated to semi-conductors as a student at Shizuoka Government University in Honshū. Upon his graduation in 1971, he answered a newspaper advertisement for Nintendo, and was subsequently hired to the R&D2 unit where he built the Laser Clay Shooting System, Nintendo's first foray into the video gaming market. After that, Takeda was shifted to the R&D3 unit where he and his team of 20 (the smallest, and yet one of the most important, of all Nintendo's R&D units) worked mostly on hardware and software refinements.

Over the years, Takeda and his team have made several lasting contributions to the video game industry, most notably the battery back-up memory, which supplied data to the RAM chip inside cartridges and allowed saving players' progress through games, the Control Stick for the Nintendo 64, a device which allowed for greater freedom of movement and has since been copied by Nintendo's chief rivals, and as chief developers of the hugely popular Wii.

When Nintendo president Satoru Iwata passed away from a bile duct tumor on July 11, 2015, Takeda temporarily assumed Iwata's duties alongside Shigeru Miyamoto until September 16, 2015 when Tatsumi Kimishima officially assumed the role.