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.
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