Not to be left out of all the recent studio acquisitions going on in the gaming space, Nintendo has just announced that it buying SRD Co. Ltd, a long time partner that has worked with Nintendo for almost 40 years. The announcement stated that Nintendo plans to purchase 100% of the outstanding shares of SRD for an undisclosed amount. As to why they chose to acquire SRD, the announcement said the following:
Completion of the Acquisition will serve to strengthen the management base of SRD and secure the availability of software development resources for Nintendo, in addition to facilitating an anticipated improvement in software development efficiency. The acquisition will only have a minor effect on Nintendo’s results.
The deal is expected to close on April 1st, 2022.
SRD has most recently worked on Ring Fit Adventure, Game Builder Garage, and 1-2 Switch, but its involvement with Nintendo goes way back to its original founding in 1979. Since then it has worked on a multitude of Nintendo games, including the original Super Mario Bros., where it was responsible for a mock-up of the game and making Mario jump according to an interview with the original developers:
Around December of 1984, I wanted to see what it would be like with a Mario jumping around who was about twice the size of the one in Mario Bros., so I asked the programmers at Nakago-san’s company, SRD, to make a test version – something in which, when you pressed a button, Mario would jump, and if you hit it repeatedly, he would jump in the air, too. And it turned out to be pretty good.
-Shigeru Miyamoto
SRD was also involved in other early projects, such as Donkey Kong Jr:
To go into a little more detail, the SRD members who had made, for example, the springs in Donkey Kong Jr., were also participating in the Super Mario Bros. project, so they brought that straight in.
– Toshihiko Nakago (President of SRD)
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Includes several titles.
Which was showcased at E3 2003.