In a post on Twitter this morning, WarioWare series director Goro Abe has announced that he has left Nintendo after starting with the company back in 1999. Having retired at the end of February 2026, it marks the end of a quarter-century of work that saw multiple WarioWare titles across nearly every major Nintendo console in the 21st century. It’s a pretty astounding list of projects, especially considering how dense each WarioWare game was.
“I resigned from Nintendo at the end of February,” Abe writes (via machine translation). “Staring 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.’” His new role will see him researching games and game development, hopefully passing that knowledge on to newer generations of game makers.
Abe’s career reportedly began at the ASCII Corporation in 1996 (according to VGC) before he joined Nintendo in 1999 to work on Wario Land 4. He then spent the next two and a half decades working on Wario related games, most famously the WarioWare series. He has appeared in the credits of other notable Nintendo titles, including Super Smash Bros. Brawl (supervisor), Bird & Beans, and Mario Party 10.
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Written by Peter Glagowski
Peter has been a freelance gaming and film critic for over seven years. His passion for Nintendo is only matched by the size of his collection.
