The History of Nintendo EAD. Part 1: The Birth of the Division

Before Video Games, There Was a Department That Drew Everything

Nintendo in the 1970s is difficult to describe in a single phrase. The company continued making playing cards and toys while also moving into electronic entertainment, arcade machines, and home television games. Every new product needed visual design, yet the number of professional designers on staff remained small.

Inside the company was the Creative Department, which brought together employees with art and design backgrounds. In the recollections of Nintendo veterans, it appears less like a game studio and more like an all-purpose design service. Its staff designed cards, illustrated manuals, prepared artwork for arcade cabinets, and joined any project that needed a visual component.

Shigeru Miyamoto joined Nintendo in April 1977. The year 1979 is sometimes cited, but Miyamoto's own recollections and Nintendo's corporate records point to 1977. That year, the company released the Color TV-Game 6 and Color TV-Game 15. The young industrial designer's first assignments included the visual design of electronic devices, choosing colors, and working on casings—in other words, not creating games in the modern sense.

An advertising spread for the Color TV-Game 6 and Color TV-Game 15 home systems, released by Nintendo in 1977.
Nintendo / 社長が訊く「ゲーム＆ウオッチ」 / nintendo.co.jp

This beginning proved more important than it might seem. Miyamoto became used to thinking not only about the image on a screen but about the entire object: how a person would notice it, what they would understand without explanation, and what action they would want to take. The same approach later appeared in his games, where a character's appearance, movement, and the rules that govern them usually reinforce one another.

Radar Scope Gives Miyamoto His Chance

By the end of the 1970s, Nintendo was trying to establish itself in the American arcade market. One of its bets was the space shooter Radar Scope. The game reached the United States, but a significant number of the shipped cabinets remained unsold. The scale of the disaster should not be exaggerated: there is no reliable evidence that Nintendo as a whole was on the verge of bankruptcy. However, Nintendo itself has confirmed that its American subsidiary was left with unsold equipment.

The solution was to replace the software while reusing the boards and cabinets that had already been manufactured. Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi asked Miyamoto to come up with a new game. For an employee of the Creative Department, this was an abrupt change: he was now responsible not for the appearance of someone else's product, but for the entire concept.

A restored Radar Scope cabinet beside Donkey Kong; the photograph clearly shows the shared design of the two cabinets.
Orlandu81 / Nintendo Radar Scope 5 Slot Original Red - Partial Restoration / arcade-museum.com

Donkey Kong was created in roughly four or five months. It was designed primarily for American arcades, so the developers tried to make the action understandable without long passages of text. A gorilla kidnaps a woman, a small hero climbs toward her, and barrels turn the route into a sequence of clearly readable hazards. The characters were not decoration layered over the mechanics: the brief story explained the goal, while the animation communicated the rules.

Official Donkey Kong artwork: Mario climbs toward Pauline while Donkey Kong throws barrels at him.
Nintendo / Nintendo Classic Mini: NES special interview – Volume 1: Donkey Kong / nintendo.com

The success of Donkey Kong changed Miyamoto's standing within Nintendo. He had shown that a designer from the art department could do more than give a game its visual identity; he could build the entire experience around character behavior. Yet he still did not have a full development team of his own. Programming and engineering tasks continued to depend on other divisions and outside partners. That arrangement could still work for an individual arcade project, but a home console required a steady stream of new games.

Famicom Turns a Breakthrough into Ongoing Work

A home console demanded a different pace: customers needed a regular supply of new cartridges, and the games had to demonstrate different capabilities of the same machine.

The Famicom launched in Japan in July 1983 alongside Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., and Popeye. Miyamoto himself did not port Donkey Kong to the console; another team handled that work. At the time, he was preparing the launch lineup and helping design a large share of the system's early games, including sports simulations, arcade-style titles, and new experiments.

The Japanese Famicom, released in 1983 with two built-in controllers—the platform that made a constant supply of home games necessary for Nintendo.
Evan-Amos / Nintendo-Famicom-Console-Set-FL.png / commons.wikimedia.org

This distinction is fundamental. Donkey Kong established Miyamoto as a successful game designer, while the Famicom forced Nintendo to build a repeatable process around people like him. It needed people who could continually devise games, programmers who understood the console's processor, audio specialists, and a manager capable of keeping several projects moving at once.

A separate group began to form around Miyamoto. Historical reference works usually call it Research & Development No. 4, or R&D4. But when the participants' own memories are considered instead of later organizational charts, the boundary between the old Creative Department and the new team becomes much less distinct.

R&D4 Has No Undisputed Birthday

Secondary sources often give an exact founding date for R&D4: September 30, 1983. Publicly available Nintendo documents and interviews do not establish any single formal moment of transition with the same confidence. Takashi Tezuka, who joined the company in 1984, said directly that he was assigned to the Creative Department at the time. He and his few colleagues still illustrated manuals, playing cards, and arcade cabinet artwork.

Miyamoto remembered a different point of reference. Roughly seven or eight years after he joined Nintendo, during the development of Super Mario Bros., Hiroshi Ikeda became his manager. Ikeda was a former Toei Animation director. According to Miyamoto, Ikeda was the first head of the Information Development group and gave the team broad freedom.

Together, these accounts describe not the sudden opening of a new studio but a gradual reorganization between 1983 and 1985. The Creative Department's artists became increasingly involved in game design, young employees began gathering around Miyamoto, and Ikeda turned the group into a manageable development unit. The name R&D4 is useful for describing the period, but it should not suggest that the old department vanished one day and a fully formed EAD immediately appeared in its place.

Tezuka and Nakago Connect Ideas with Code

Takashi Tezuka joined Nintendo after graduating from art university in 1984. Before becoming a full-time employee, he spent several weeks helping with pixel art for Super Punch-Out!!, and his first full project was Devil World. Tezuka was not an experienced player and, by his own admission, had not even heard of Pac-Man before working on a game that would inevitably be compared with it.

Takashi Tezuka during a conversation about the origins of the team that created Super Mario Bros.
Nintendo / 1. It All Began In 1984 / nintendo.com

His lack of gaming experience was not an obstacle. In the small team, there was still no rigid separation between the person who proposed an idea and the person who tested it in code. Designers discussed possibilities directly with programmers, quickly assembled prototypes, and discarded anything that did not work.

One of Nintendo's main partners was SRD. Its programmer Toshihiko Nakago came to Nintendo because he knew the 6502 processor family, on which the Famicom's CPU was based. He initially worked with R&D2, porting arcade games to the new console. Nakago recalled that while making the Donkey Kong version, he did not even know who Miyamoto was.

They met later, without ceremony: Miyamoto approached the programmer and told him they would now be making Excitebike together. Ice Climber, Super Mario Bros., and Zelda followed. Nakago formally remained an employee of an outside company, but SRD's Kyoto office was located inside Nintendo's headquarters. In practice, its programmers worked beside the designers and became a permanent part of the production pipeline.

Toshihiko Nakago, an SRD programmer and the long-time technical partner of the teams led by Miyamoto and Tezuka.
Nintendo / 1. It All Began In 1984 / nintendo.com

Sound became the third pillar. Koji Kondo joined Nintendo in the same year, 1984, and Devil World was his first project at the company. The composer did not simply hand finished melodies over to a technical specialist: he sat near the developers, watched the game in motion, and could adjust the music to the rhythm of the controls. This created the working relationship that would define the future EAD for years: Miyamoto and Tezuka shaped the play experience, Nakago and SRD turned it into functioning software, and Kondo connected movement with sound.

Devil World and Excitebike Become a Workshop

The group's early games matter for more than their individual merits. Each one solved a particular technical problem, and the solutions carried over into the next project. In Devil World, the team learned how to move a larger character reliably. Excitebike provided experience with smooth scrolling across long spaces and transitions between sections. Ice Climber continued the team's work on jumping physics and vertical movement.

Knowledge also came from outside the group. When Nakago compared the arcade version of Balloon Fight with HAL Laboratory's smoother home version, Satoru Iwata explained how to use fractional coordinates to make character movement appear more fluid. Calculations for acceleration, deceleration, and buoyancy became more precise. Nakago later applied the same principle to the underwater stages of Super Mario Bros.

This episode illustrates how the early team worked. Its advantage was not a secret Miyamoto method or an infallible ability to choose ideas, but the short distance between observation and application. A programming technique from Balloon Fight could improve Mario, a mechanic tested in Devil World could become the foundation of the next game, and a failed prototype could reveal what should not be done.

Super Mario Bros. and Zelda Are Born at Neighboring Desks

After Devil World and Excitebike, the same group began working on Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda at the same time. Today, these series look like two predetermined pillars of Nintendo, but in 1985 they were parallel experiments that constantly exchanged ideas.

Super Mario Bros. did not begin with a finished version of Mario. Nakago remembered a 16-by-32-pixel rectangle that moved across a single screen and initially could not even jump. Tezuka noticed that the earlier Mario Bros. was still selling well and suggested using the recognizable character. This brought together technical experience with a large protagonist and scrolling backgrounds with an already proven figure.

Miyamoto and Tezuka drew the levels on paper, then passed the diagrams to SRD's programmers. They could usually see a working version of their changes about once a day, so they tried to bring each map to a reasonable state before the data was entered. A surviving sheet dated February 28, 1985 shows not only scenery but also the palette: bushes and clouds were assembled from identical graphic elements assigned different colors.

A plan for Super Mario Bros. background graphics, signed by Miyamoto on February 28, 1985; the available colors are marked on the right.
Nintendo / 4. Designing Levels Together / nintendo.com

Zelda also looked different at first. The original version consisted mainly of dungeons and was developed with Nintendo's VS. arcade hardware in mind. The team later decided to add an overworld, connecting the separate mazes into a single world. For a time, Zelda progressed faster, and the developers expected it to be released before Mario.

The earliest surviving Zelda specification is dated February 1, 1985. In the documents, the project was simply called Adventure, while one folder carried the working title Adventure Mario. Even at that stage, the team listed items, enemies, and actions not as elements of a story but as a set of possibilities from which players would have to construct their own path.

The first page of The Legend of Zelda's specification, dated February 1, 1985, listing game objects and rules.
Nintendo / Bonus 1: Ancient Documents from 1985 / nintendo.com

Miyamoto and Tezuka drew the first overworld map together on a single sheet: Tezuka filled in the left side and Miyamoto the right. This was not an approved world being handed from an author to an implementer, but a shared process of constructing space. Even the famous rotating fire bars were first tested in Zelda, but the team later decided they worked better in the castles of Super Mario Bros. and moved the idea there.

The first overworld map for The Legend of Zelda: Tezuka drew the left side, and Miyamoto the right.
Nintendo / Bonus 1: Ancient Documents from 1985 / nintendo.com

Super Mario Bros. was released in Japan in September 1985, while The Legend of Zelda followed on the Famicom Disk System in February 1986. Both games grew from the work of the same team, but they embodied two opposite approaches. Mario turned movement to the right into a carefully arranged sequence of decisions; Zelda gave players a space in which they chose their own direction and order of actions.

Two Hits Establish a Working Method, Not Just Genres

The success of Mario and Zelda is often described as the birth of two great series. For the history of the division, something else mattered more: Nintendo now had a team capable of transferring accumulated knowledge from one very different game to another. The same people could discuss jumping physics, maze structure, screen readability, and memory limits without splitting those subjects into separate production lines.

The team did not hide limitations; it turned them into material for the game. When Nakago discovered that Tezuka had accidentally used only half of the map array allocated for Zelda's dungeons, Miyamoto suggested leaving the completed section as it was. The team used the free half to build the more difficult Second Quest. The mistake was not an advantage in itself, but the small group could quickly recognize a new opportunity in the unused memory.

This approach differed from the romantic image of the lone creator. Miyamoto set the direction and relentlessly tested whether ideas were understandable, but the result depended on Tezuka, Nakago, Kondo, and other staff members. The future EAD took shape as an environment of constant discussion across disciplines, not as the private workshop of a single famous designer.

From Seven People to the “Map Room”

After the first hits, the workload rose sharply. Tezuka made his directorial debut with the Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2, later known in the West as The Lost Levels. The team continued working on Zelda, developed new games, and simultaneously searched for a way to create a true Mario sequel rather than merely a more difficult set of stages.

Even then, it had not been rigidly divided into a “Mario group” and a “Zelda group.” Zelda II: The Adventure of Link moved much of the action to a side view, while Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic, released in 1987, later became the basis for the Western Super Mario Bros. 2. New employees joined major projects alongside veterans, and the team gradually expanded together with the range of its responsibilities.

Development of Super Mario Bros. 3 began in the spring of 1986 and continued for roughly two and a half years. Tezuka first tried showing the action from an elevated angle, but from that perspective players had difficulty judging whether Mario's feet had touched the ground. The idea was abandoned, and the team returned to a side view. The episode was characteristic of the group: even the sequel to a major hit could not save an idea that failed in practice.

The scale was already different. Miyamoto estimated that the first Super Mario Bros. was made by seven or eight people, while between twenty and thirty worked on the third game. In the long, narrow “map room,” programmers entered data from paper diagrams into the game every day. By the end of development, Nintendo was assigning more and more employees to the project, although Kondo still handled all the sound by himself.

The expanding team created the need for another reorganization. A system built around direct conversations between a few designers and SRD programmers now had to preserve its speed with dozens of participants. At the same time, Super Famicom was approaching, and its capabilities demanded dedicated technical specialists, tools, and research.

By 1989, It Was Already EAD

The exact date when R&D4 was renamed Entertainment Analysis & Development is difficult to trace in Nintendo's publicly available materials. However, an official discussion with the F-Zero developers confirms that the name EAD was already in use by 1989. Programmer Yasunari Nishida described himself as the division's first programmer, while designer Takaya Imamura recalled joining Nintendo in 1989 and immediately beginning development for the new console.

F-Zero marked an important turning point. Before the Super Famicom era, Nintendo had entrusted a large share of its programming to partners, especially SRD, but EAD developed this game entirely in-house. The nine-person team brought together design, graphics, and three internal programmers. Paper maps did not disappear, but an internal technology group was now taking shape alongside the designers.

A paper plan of F-Zero tracks from the development files; the materials preserve the date September 6, 1989.
Nintendo / Nintendo Classic Mini: SNES developer interview – Volume 2: F-ZERO / nintendo.com

This completed the first stage in the history of the future EAD. The Creative Department learned to devise games rather than merely give them a visual identity. The success of Donkey Kong gave Miyamoto authority, Famicom turned individual projects into continuous production, SRD supplied the early programming foundation, and Super Mario Bros. and Zelda established a culture of collaborative design. The name EAD appeared only after its central principle had already formed: technology, visuals, sound, and player behavior should all be discussed at the same table.

In the 1990s, the division would go on to create Super Mario World, F-Zero, Star Fox, and A Link to the Past, and to lead Nintendo's transition into the three-dimensional era. But that is the next story. The later, complex structure of multiple production groups was not the result of a bureaucratic blueprint, but the growth of the same small team that once drew levels on paper and waited until the next day to see them on a screen.