WarioWare director reveals what changed after he left Nintendo

Former WarioWare series director Goro Abe says leaving Nintendo and working with a young generation of students has given him a new perspective on game creation.

Abe left Nintendo earlier this year after more than 25 years at the company. He joined Nintendo in 1999 and worked on titles including Wario Land 4 before becoming director of the WarioWare series, most recently 2023’s WarioWare: Move It!.

The programmer and designer has since started a new career as a professor at Osaka’s Electro-Communication University, where he teaches students game design and how it can be used to address social issues.

In addition to giving lectures to students, Abe is working on research into new game experiences via the university’s ‘Experimental Game Design Laboratory.’

Speaking to VGC about his new career, Abe said he decided to leave Nintendo after contemplating his future as he reached his 50th birthday.

“Making games takes a lot of time, and I knew that based on my age and career that I could not make that many more games in the future,” he said. “And I wanted to challenge myself to do other stuff. So I thought it would be interesting to do things that I had never done before, and that’s why I decided to go into teaching.”

The career change has given Abe an opportunity to observe how the younger generation interacts with games, which he described as one of the most interesting aspects of his new role.

“It’s very interesting for me to be closer to the players,” he said.

“Also, I used to be at Nintendo, as you know, but going away from Nintendo also kind of made me understand different perspectives, like how other companies and developers are thinking, and also understanding the indie scene a little bit more.

“So, it’s very important to understand a very different perspective from being inside Nintendo.”

Abe said his experience making WarioWare’s quickfire mini-games has proved useful in the classroom because of the creative constraints involved.

“I can of course leverage my past experiences,” he said. “Making very short games like this has a lot of constraints. It helps me a lot to teach students who are trying to make games because of the constraints that come with making those types of games.”

Abe says he won’t stop making games

Despite switching from Nintendo to university teaching, Abe says he isn’t retiring from making new games of his own. His university workload currently leaves him little time to develop games, he said, but he continues to think about what he could create next.

“Yes, I’m thinking outside even the scope of my university right now,” Abe said. “I’m already thinking of making new things with people from the industry and developers I know from the industry.”

The designer added that, now that he’s no longer constrained by the commercial considerations of a big corporation, he wants to create things that are “a bit more outside of the box”.

“I no longer need to think about profitability, making sure you can sell a lot, or making sure you understand the dedicated controllers or specialized devices,” he explained.

“So, it’s not limited by those constraints anymore. I feel I want to make things that are a bit more outside of the box, you know, and that can simply move people through the experience. Games or other forms of entertainment.”

Abe said his university research is focused on “creating games that I’ve never done before and leveraging, for instance, the controller as the basic input to make something new.”

But Abe’s ambitions extend beyond making games for established players. He wants to explore how game design can reach people who don’t normally play games, he said.

“My approach is really about trying not necessarily to make games for gamers, but games for other people who don’t necessarily play games. I believe that a lot of people interact with games in general, not only gamers,” he said.

“So I would like to continue trying to make experiences that would also be appealing to people who are not necessarily into games, and it could also potentially help other companies.

“It could be gamification or stuff like that for those who are not making games, especially not for the purpose of making games, but leveraging the impact of games to create different places.”