When Nintendo merged its EAD and SPD divisions together into Nintendo EPD, one thing that I was genuinely excited about, is the SPD developers now having access to the staff and tools of some of the most talented programmers and artists in the industry. Nintendo SPD (Software Planning & Development) was the department of Nintendo that specialized in small-scale, niche titles made on a shoe-string budget, mostly for Nintendo's handhelds. They also served the dual purpose of overseeing all of Nintendo's external productions (Fire Emblem, Pokemon, etc.). While EAD was crafting blockbuster titles like Super Mario and The Legend of Zelda, SPD was quietly churning out some of Nintendo's most unique offerings. Brain Age, Tomodachi Life, Rhythm Heaven, WarioWare, Rusty's Real Deal Baseball, Band Brothers, Kousoku Card Battle: Card Hero, and a few others. They even created the original prototypes for Nintendo's Miis, which were so good that Miyamoto transferred the people to programed them over to EAD.
So far, we've seen from the likes of Miitopia, 1-2 Switch, and Nintendo Labo, what the original SPD teams can do with an EAD-esque budget. But all three of those games came from a team led by Kouichi Kawamoto, the co-creator of Brain Age. The Rhythm Heaven and WarioWare team, specifically Yoshio Sakamoto and his colleagues, haven't put out a game for the Switch quite yet. Now it could be because they were just coming off of finishing up Metroid Samus Returns with Mercury Steam and having just released Rhythm Heaven Megamix not too long ago. Even still, I'm excited to see what they're capable of on the Switch with a larger budget. Nothing that rival's Nintendo's cash-cows, but bigger than what they were able to do on the DS and 3DS.
