IGDA pushes better game credits as Nintendo workers face career risks

A missing line in the credits can do more than bruise egos at Nintendo. For developers, QA testers, localization staff and business teams who help ship a game, it can erase the paper trail that proves what they built and why the next studio should hire them.

That is the pressure point behind the IGDA’s Game Crediting Guidelines. In its 2023 State of Credits survey, 51.3% of 582 respondents said they never, seldom or only sometimes received official credit, and 83.1% said they were unsure or no when asked whether their employer or client even had a credits policy. The group says the problem is not confined to one company or one region. Credits can vary from game to game inside the same studio, with workers mislabeled, left off entirely or reduced to vague roles despite spending years on a project. IGDA says that hurts both career advancement and awards prospects.

The organization’s latest update, shaped by feedback from the IGDA Localization SIG and a GDC roundtable, also pointed toward a practical fix: an open-source credits toolkit for Unity and Unreal that would make scrolling, easily updated credits simpler to implement. That matters in a company like Nintendo, where craft and legacy are central to the brand. A clean credit trail is not just a courtesy. It is how workers show impact after a launch, how managers preserve institutional memory, and how studios keep faith with the people who carry a franchise forward.

Nintendo has been pulled into the issue repeatedly. In January 2025, Donkey Kong Country Returns HD omitted the original Retro Studios developers from the remaster’s credits and instead used a card saying the game was "based on the work of the original development staff." Nintendo said it believes in giving proper credit for anyone involved in making or contributing to a game’s creation, but it did not explain why the omission happened. Former Retro engineer Zoid Kirsch had already said in February 2023 that he was "let down" by the lack of individual credits in Metroid Prime Remastered.

The concern widened in July 2024, when a separate report alleged that Nintendo does not list external translators from agencies in credits on major first-party titles including The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Super Mario RPG. One source said the alleged practice also bars those workers from listing the projects on their CV, turning missing credits into a direct career-mobility problem rather than a symbolic slight.

Other studios have shown the issue can be fixed after the fact. Striking Distance Studios later updated The Callisto Protocol to add more than 50 names under Additional Development after omissions in the original release. That is the standard credits now have to meet: not just finishing the game, but accurately showing who made it and giving those workers a record that lasts beyond launch day.