WarioWare series director Goro Abe has left Nintendo

The director of the WarioWare series has announced that he has left Nintendo.

Goro Abe posted a message on X confirming that he resigned from the company last month, and will be leaving the 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.

“I resigned from Nintendo at the end of February,” Abe wrote. “Starting in April, I will be working as a professor at Osaka Electro-Communication University.

“I will be part of the newly established ‘Game and Social Design Program’. I plan to engage in research related to games and game development, so I hope to interact with a wider range of people in various ways than ever before.”

Abe briefly worked as Ascii in 1996 before joining Nintendo in 1999, where he was one of the programmers on Game Boy Advance title Wario Land 4.

He then played a major role in the first WarioWare game, where he worked on game design, graphic design and microgame programming.

Since then, Abe has mainly worked on the rest of the WarioWare series, serving as director in WarioWare Inc: Mega Party Games on GameCube, WarioWare Twisted on GBA, WarioWare Touched on DS, WarioWare Smooth Moves on Wii, WarioWare DIY on DS, Game & Wario on Wii U, WarioWare Gold on 3DS, WarioWare: Get it Together on Switch and 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.

At 60 and 62 respectively, Konno and Tanabe were just two of many prominent Nintendo creators from the Famicom and Super Famicom era at, or approaching, retirement age, including Super Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto (72), Super Metroid director Yoshio Sakamoto (65), Mario designer Takashi Tezuka (64), composer Koji Kondo (63), Zelda boss Eiji Aonuma (62), and Super Mario Kart designer Tadashi Sugiyama (66).