Kazuaki Morita

Kazuaki Morita is an employee of Nintendo and its subsidiary SRD Co., Ltd.

Morita serves as a company director and Technical Fellow at SRD, and has been involved in the development of a number of Nintendo games, beginning with Ice Climber on the Super Famicom.

Biography
Morita taught himself computer programming at a young age, stating that there were no schools that he knew of that taught the subject at the time.

Upon joining Nintendo, he worked as a programmer on Ice Climber and Super Mario Bros, followed by the original Legend of Zelda. Morita also worked as programmer onYume Kōjō: Dokidoki Panic, citing the game as one that allowed him to experiment with a number of new programming techniques and further develop his skills.

Following his work on Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, Morita would serve as an object programmer on.

After the release of the Game Boy handheld, Morita began to experiment with prototyping a Zelda-like game using a Game Boy development kit, which led to Nintendo exploring the idea of porting to the Game Boy. Once the project transitioned to being an original Zelda game for the Game Boy, Morita enjoyed a considerable amount of creative freedom while working on its mechanics, and contributed a large number of ideas to it, such as being able to tame a Chain Chomp enemy and walk it on a leash. Also among these ideas was a fishing minigame that Morita developed for the title, inspired by his own love for the hobby, and this would serve as the first of several fishing games developed by him for the series.

Morita has stated that he needed to re-learn programming to keep up when Nintendo began developing 3D games with the Nintendo 64, with Star Fox 64 being his first 3D project. Following this, Morita worked on, a project for which he programmed the game's boss characters, created the fishing minigame, and also drafted the dialogue and personality for the Pond Owner character. Morita was also responsible for the player's ability to cut signs at different angles using Link's sword.

During the development of, Morita would once again develop a fishing minigame for that title, and personally programmed its motion controls for game's Wii port. More recently, Morita has served as a programming director on The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, a supervisor on, and a supervisor on.

Notable Achievements
Morita is one of Nintendo's oldest employees, having worked on a large number of the company's games encompassing the Mario, Zelda, and Star Fox franchises. He has played a key role in the development of a number of Zelda games, including, which went into production following his experiments with a Game Boy development kit. The existence of the fishing minigames in various Zelda titles is also credited largely to Morita, who kickstarted the tradition with, and would go on to program the fishing games in that title, , and.

Games

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