Departing WarioWare director says he’ll keep making smaller, ‘unconventional’ games after leaving Nintendo

WarioWare series director Goro Abe has said his decision to leave Nintendo doesn’t mean he’ll no longer be making games.

On Monday, Abe posted a message on X announcing that he had resigned from Nintendo last month, and would be leaving the commercial games industry altogether.

Abe will be joining Osaka Electro-Communication University, a private university, where he will be working as a professor at its Department of Digital Games.

Despite his move from commercial games development to academia, however, Abe still intends to keep making games, albeit smaller and less traditional ones.

“Becoming a professor doesn’t mean retiring from game creation,” he wrote on X today. “I’ll keep making things via new research approaches – small / experimental games with unconventional mechanics outside standard commerce, and gamified social services through industry-academia collaboration.”

Abe also suggested that his departure from Nintendo wasn’t on bad terms, adding: “Moving forward as a fan, I am excited to see what the future holds for Nintendo, including the WarioWare series.”

The veteran designer, who was at Nintendo for 27 years, worked on game design, graphic design and microgame programming on the original Game Boy Advance WarioWare title.

Since then, he’s been mainly associated with the series, serving as a director on every major entry right up to 2023’s WarioWare: Move It on Switch.

Nintendo has seen a number of prominent creators leaving the company in the past few years, though some have done so through retirement rather than finding work elsewhere.

In January it was revealed that both Hideki Konno (known for Mario Kart and Yoshi’s Island) and Kensuke Tanabe (who worked on Super Mario Bros 2 and 3, and the Metroid Prime series) had both retired from Nintendo.