Biographical and Professional History
Genyo Takeda was born in Osaka, Japan. As a child, Takeda enjoyed working with his hands, building small items such as miniature trains and airplanes. He attended Shizuoka Government University in Honshū, where he studied semi-conductors. After his graduation in 1970, he was hired by Nintendo after Takeda responded to a newspaper ad. He was interviewed and subsequently hired by Gunpei Yokoi. Takeda worked alongside Masayuki Uemura in Nintendo’s R&D2 team developing what they termed ‘an electronic shooting range.’ After a year at R&D2, Takeda was assigned control as General Manager over Nintendo’s fledgling R&D3 department. By far the smallest of the R&D departments at Nintendo with about 20 employees, R&D3’s primary responsibilities were the technical hardware design and development software for both the arcade systems and the later home consoles, the Famicom and the NES. The team also helped create bank switching and the MMC chips in the NES cartridges. R&D3 also made forays into video game development, producing few such famous titles such as the Punch-Out!! and StarTropics series of games. R&D3 was also responsible for releasing a series of sports games for Nintendo, including Pro Wrestling, NES Play Action Football, and Ice Hockey. These titles were aimed primarily at the American market, where they sold well.
A major limitation with the NES cartridges was the inability to save directly on the cartridge. The cartridges contain RAM, which are easily writable but lose all stored memory as soon as the power is turned off. Takeda is credited for his team’s development of the battery back-up memory, which was first used in the North American and European versions of Shigeru Miyamoto’s The Legend of Zelda. It supplies a long-life power source to the RAM chip, maintaining the saved data even when the main power supply is cut or the cartridge is removed. Takeda is also credited with the invention of the Analog controller for the Nintendo 64 system, a style which has since been copied by Microsoft and Sony for their respective systems. Takeda’s R&D3 team was renamed Integrated Research and Development in 2000. In that same year, they worked with Conexant to create broadband and modem peripherals for the Nintendo GameCube. Takeda was promoted in 2002 to Senior Management Director, while still maintaining his position as General Manager.
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