Wario Where?
Earlier this year, Nintendo veteran and WarioWare legend Goro Abe announced that he was leaving the company and taking up a teaching post at the Osaka Electro-Communication University. Roughly seven months on, VGC got the chance to chat with the dev about his post-Nintendo life, and, rather expectedly, games are still very much on his mind.
“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,” Abe told VGC. “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.”
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Now 50, the dev explained that his teaching role has proven a prime opportunity to be “closer to the players” and to understand things from “different perspectives”:
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.
This expanded view means that Abe hasn’t given up on game development completely: “I’m thinking outside even the scope of my university right now,” he told VGC, “I’m already thinking of making new things with people from the industry and developers I know from the industry.”
There are other changes to how Abe thinks about game development outside Nintendo than he did when he was in it, as the dev mentioned that he no longer has to prioritise profitability or making titles for specialised controllers and devices. “Not that those constraints are necessarily bad,” he clarified, “I actually enjoyed thinking creatively within them when I was working in the industry, and I think they are a natural part of commercial game development. What I mean is, I’m now attracted to trying a different approach as well.”
Abe worked on every entry in the WarioWare series since the Game Boy Advance original, with his last project seeing him in the director’s seat on 2023’s WarioWare: Move It! All of that microgame madness now has him on the hunt for something a bit different: “I feel I want to make things that are a bit more outside of the box and that can simply move people through the experience, whether that’s games or other forms of entertainment.”
While it was a shame to see Abe leave the company — and we’re interested to see where the WarioWare series goes from here — it’s nice to hear that he’s now got the chance to try something new and find a professional challenge while he’s at it.
We had a wonderful time with Move It! back in 2023, calling it “another great entry in this long-running franchise that brings back the motion-controlled mayhem whilst giving you plenty of ways to enjoy its loony fun with family and friends” in our 8/10 review.
