I was looking at the credits of some EPD games and figured I would mention here now that the Switch is winding down.
I was curious how many staff overall worked on the games across the various games, so I went to Kyoto Report to figure out who is EPD and who is not. This is a lot better than mobygames, which has a lot uh, questionable credits listings. It can be very confusing at times with Mario Club and other developers, but I think I sorted things well enough.
These lists don't include producers, technical support, coordinators, or artwork, though I also tried to count them separately. Its a lot of stuff and I can't post just a doc, so I will post folders instead.
drive.google.com
This is by position as well shared staff between games (it looks at the last credit, one list includes supervisor/support roles, and the other goes to the game before that since I wasn't sure what to go with) as well each year someone was lasted credited by position. I call these "help sheets" since they are supposed to help me come up with questions, but its probably not the most intuitive name.
The counting was what I was most interested in, though due note that I just wanted the closest I could get to the whole number throughout the Switch, even people who are confirmed to leave or contract are included. I wanna compare sizes between generations eventually as well.
The number was 773 unique names, and 913 if you include technical support, coordinators, and artwork credits.
Some neat things about this:
541 of the 773 were 2023-24 credits, and since 2019 is 725 staff listed. The majority of the ones from 2018 and 17 were likely contract, since left, Tokyo staff, or on mobile games/other uncredited stuff. Probably.
Either way, I think this doc might be useful if anyone wants to look at a bunch of names by year, it feels like a good springboard for me at least on stuff that confuses me and makes it easier to ask questions later, so I feel its worth sharing in case others are interested.
A question I have of my own is does anyone know what Yoshiki Haruhana and Yoichi Yamada have been up to? I cannot find anything on them after Link's Awakening.
drive.google.com
This is just the EPD staff for all the stuff I looked at.
drive.google.com
This one is art, planning, programming, and sound credits for EPD with all their Switch games (and one Wii U/3DS game to use for the dev team breakdown pages) These were a learning experience, and might include errors that are later corrected in the by individual game sheets.
This was fun for me to do, hopefully its useful if anyone takes a look. I was gonna try to do more percentage stuff the previous game of every game, but lost interest in that, but the listings are in the first folder under "staff source" in case people are interested.
EDIT:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/180w7p5MpdsFPFoVbZrIuBs0zHbl1R9Cx?usp=sharing
Forgot to include this, this is coordinator, tech support, artwork, and supervisor list for EPD. These are mostly names only, but probably should include anyways.. The most confusing one was all the Pokemon series coordinators, tried my best to get the ones who were EPD only for those.
All some notation stuff I should mention:
*= evidence they left the company (if its on a specific game, it means evidence they went from Mario Club to EPD, maybe anyway)
**= could be wrong company they are listed for, or in rare cases something that was interesting to me.
***= this was anyone who served more than one role so I don't list names twice, ex. someone both worked as a planner and artist throughout the Switch.
