Risa Tabata

Risa Tabata (田端里沙) is a Japanese video game assistant producer and production coordinator working at Nintendo.

Career
Tabata was born in Osaka and graduated from Osaka University of Foreign Studies as a liberal arts student majoring in Chinese. After graduating, she applied to Nintendo with the intent of doing clerical work at the company, influenced by her experience of playing Famicom games with her younger brother back in middle school. Upon being hired in April 2001, Tabata would instead find herself as part of Nintendo Entertainment Analysis and Development, despite lacking any knowledge of game design at the time, and immediately assigned to be the production coordinator for Metroid Prime, assisting with communication between the Japanese Nintendo team and the Austin, Texas-based Retro Studios.

Since then, Tabata has continued to work on externally-developed Nintendo projects under the purview of producer Kensuke Tanabe, going on to become assistant producer and production manager for subsequent Metroid Prime games, as well as various other Nintendo titles.