by [name redacted]

Part two of my ongoing culture column; originally published by Next Generation.

So Nintendo’s at the top of its game again – or near enough to clap, anyway. The DS is one of the bigger success stories in recent hardware history. People are starting to buy into the Wii hype; even Sony and Microsoft’s chiefs have gone on record with how the system impresses them. Japan is mincing no words; 73% of Famitsu readers polled expect the Wii to “win” the next “console war”, whatever that means. And these people aren’t even Nintendo’s target audience.

Satoru Iwata has done a swell job, the last couple of years, taking a company that was coasting on past success, whose reputation had devolved to schoolyard snickers – that even posted a loss for the first time in its century-plus history – and making it both vital and trendy again.

So what happened to Nintendo, anyway? How is it that gaming’s superstar was such a dud, for so many years? What’s the white elephant in the room, that everyone has taken such pains to rationalize? It is, of course, the same man credited for most of Nintendo’s success: Shigeru Miyamoto.

The Golden Pit

Miyamoto started off under revered Nintendo inventor Gunpei Yokoi, at internal R&D group #1 – the original Nintendo software department. It’s there that Miyamoto created Donkey Kong and the original Mario Bros., alongside other designers who filled out the Nintendo catalog with experimental games like Gumshoe, Balloon Fight, and Clu-Clu Land. Miyamoto’s early games were so successful that he was soon given his own studio, R&D#4 – now known as Nintendo EAD – to work on his next opus or two. There, Miyamoto followed his muse and churned out Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda, each game a little closer to expressing his set of ideas for what he wanted to do with videogames.

Miyamoto is, at heart, a children’s book author. From Donkey Kong on, nearly all of his games have had been fairy tales: little fantasies with a beginning and an end, where the player sees new places, meets new challenges, maybe learns a lesson or two. He has said that his inspiration came from the caves and fields behind his house when he was a boy, and his desire to express the same feeling of wonder and exploration that he felt. It just happened that Miyamoto found himself with videogames as his canvas, despite no background in programming or computers or indeed game design; he was just an illustrator.

Then, after a few successes, this wonderful little man with little ambition and only his own personal whims to guide him was put in charge of the most powerful videogame company on Earth.

Tunnelvision

Though it’s great that things have worked out so well for the guy, there’s still the fact that Miyamoto’s is only one voice – and a rather limited voice, at that. Yet starting around 1989, his was the only significant voice within Nintendo. In the wake of Miyamoto’s success, everyone else was put on standby – since clearly, with the success that Miyamoto had brought Nintendo, he knew exactly what he was doing.

After a few more fan favorites like Metroid and Kid Icarus, Nintendo R&D#1 got wound down and reassigned to Game Boy duty. As a result, with few exceptions, nearly every first-party game released for the Super NES was from Nintendo EAD. That which did not directly involve Miyamoto was overseen and informed by him. The thing is, by that point Miyamoto had more or less said his fill; the only task left was to refine his ideas. The result is that Nintendo’s first-party output for the SNES was greatly decreased over the NES, both in quantity and in variety, and that the bulk of it was simply enhanced NES software.

Zelda 3 is the same as Zelda 1, except with the core game mechanics extrapolated and “cleaned up” from a game perspective. The same can be said of Super Mario World versus Super Mario 3, and even R&D#1’s Super Metroid, compared to Metroid 1 – each case in direct contrast to some of the subjective advances made in earlier sequels. All the games are basically flawless in execution, which is both the reason for their long-standing acclaim and sort of a problem, from a progressive standpoint.

To be less critical than I could be, the 16-bit era was more about perfecting what had gone before than about using the tools at hand – the new technology and experience – to say anything particularly new. So, okay. On its own, this decision is basically innocuous. The reason it was a problem in this case is that there was almost nothing going on to balance it off. The Miyamoto way – the rules set back in the late ’80s for very specific context-sensitive reasons – was the only way. And this aesthetic, this mentality, this rulebook became – through Nintendo’s mantra, in absence of any mainstream alternative (except maybe Sega) – the popular conception of the Platonic videogame. The ideal videogame. And it’s here that the myth of Miyamoto really began to blow out of proportion.

Playing Interference

The curious thing is, the market seemed to sense this at the time. Until the end of the 16-bit era, the SNES was consistently outsold by the Genesis; however history may record it now, at the time it was a little newer, a little fresher-feeling, a little less ponderous. Nintendo’s system was seen as nice, and certainly impressive on the technical end, yet sort of stodgy. Sega had games no one had played before – or not exactly, anyway. Nintendo getting Street Fighter II before Sega did a little to knock that impression. By the time Donkey Kong Country came out and Nintendo finally pulled ahead – again, strictly on “wow” factor – Sega had already begun to get distracted by its own ego, essentially paving the way for a third interloper to take charge of the industry.

If at its best the SNES was less of a success than the NES, the N64 at least started well. Mario 64 in particular, though not much of a game, was an excellent demonstration of the potential of 3D space, and the way it might be used in future development. It also served to demonstrate Nintendo’s popularization of the analog stick, as a tool for 3D navigation. This, combined with the improved use of shoulder buttons in Zelda and Goldeneye and an early attempt at context-sensitive buttons in Zelda, essentially sketch out all of the interface innovations since the NES.

And yet after Mario 64, Miyamoto – and Nintendo – went mum. Nintendo never followed up on it; neither did anyone else. All anyone picked up on was the set dressing – the star collecting and the hub-based structure. As for Ocarina of Time: though its interface was innovative, and it now had a 3D camera, at its core it could well have been made on the NES. Game Boy, even. The underlying material didn’t really live up to the nuance implied by the advances lumped on top. So what the N64 gave us, essentially, is some new vocabulary to chew on, with no real direction as to what to do with it or what it actually meant.

As a result, Sony slapped two analog sticks and force feedback onto its controller. Then Sega devised analog triggers. Then Sony made every button analog. And maybe three PS2 games ever made use of it.

Though Nintendo started its third console generation with a bang, it proved to be something of a one-hit wonder, eventually putting most of its energy on the aging Game Boy – at that time enjoying a Pokésplosion. With only EAD to do its main design work, Nintendo became all the more insular. Even third parties abandoned Nintendo en masse.

To pick up the slack between first-party releases, and out of appreciation for the success of (the incredibly vapid) Donkey Kong Country, Nintendo signed on Rareware as a partner; Rare quickly became something of an EAD goomba, taking as legion anything Nintendo put out and then pimping it out with more items, more places, more tasks. More stuff.

So the result was even fewer games than for the N64, almost all of which came from EAD or Rare, most of which cost an arm and a leg, only a few of which were necessary. If you owned an N64, either you were a Nintendo fan, your parents bought it for you, you were a hardware completist, or you got wowed by (pick one) Mario, Zelda, or Goldeneye. Though not abysmal, sales could have been better. Nintendo mostly made do on the sheer numbers of each game that got sold, in part due to how few games were available.

Going to Lunch

If the N64 showed Nintendo one thing, it was the whole eggs/basket axiom. Clearly Miyamoto can’t do everything himself. The answer they lit on sounds fine in principle: institute an apprenticeship system. Nintendo also founded Nintendo Software Technology as a landing platform for DigiPen graduates, formed new development studios, and invested in outside developers (including Western ones). Nevertheless, EAD remained its flagship studio; most of its energies seemed devoted to training “new blood” under Miyamoto, to pass on the craft from master to disciple.

The results have been… interesting. Eiji Aonuma, probably the most high-profile of the “new generation” of Nintendo directors, typifies some of the problems of the system. Here’s a guy with a lot of great, original ideas of his own – yet as a Miyamoto disciple, he’s conflicted. Every interview with him I’ve read, every time I’ve heard him speak about design, he goes on and on about “The Miyamoto way” of doing things – about what is and is not “Miyamoto-correct”. What’s worse is that he… often seems to miss the point, a little. At GDC a couple of years ago, I clearly remember a presentation where Aonuma showed the difference between the timing of the Zelda “discovery chime” in Ocarina of Time and in Wind Waker: before, a player’s bomb blasted the chime right out of the rock. After, the chime was delayed until the dust cleared and the player could see what was unearthed. The change in timing did nothing to add to the reality of the situation. If anything, it made the game feel more artificial and – frankly – a little patronizing to the player. A minor complaint, to be sure. Still, it seems illustrative.

The thing that seemed galling is that Aonuma claimed he made the change so the game would be more “Miyamoto-correct”. Indeed, most of the poor decisions in Wind Waker seem to come from exactly that thought process. If only Aonuma had the confidence to just do things his own way, according to what actually works, instead of feeling compelled to defer to to another man’s doctrine, created in another time, another context, to address specific concerns.

The Other Hand

So it is that Nintendo has drawn a line: on the right is the future; on the left is the past. At least on the hardware end, and in Iwata’s rhetoric, we find an energy and a kind of nonlinear thinking almost unprecedented from Nintendo – one of the most inadvertently conservative developers around. That’s the thing, though. With all the entrenched habits, and ideas of design – with all the deification that still goes on with Miyamoto and everything he stands for – what’s Nintendo going to do with this stuff?

For years, Nintendo has been hung up on method for the sake of method, because it always worked before. If only it were so so simple as resting on their laurels; then there wouldn’t be a whole belief system to battle, in order to make the leap. Still, Iwata’s doing a pretty good job turning things around. Third parties seem interested in the hardware, and it seems clear what a skilled person can do with it. Unless the company finds some new and expressive voices, maybe at this point Nintendo isn’t even necessary as a software developer. From Gunpei Yokoi on, its strong point has always been hardware.

Even there, I’m of two minds about Nintendo. On the one hand, someone needs to make these definitive statements – that everyone, including Nintendo, has been barking up the wrong tree for years, and that maybe this over here is a pointer toward something more ideal. On the other hand, that kind of influence is exactly the problem. The Wii and the DS aren’t ends. They’re not the solution to anything; they’re just suggestions. A starting point. And yet what does Sony do, two weeks before E3? Slap motion sensors into its Dual Shock 3. Wonderful. Great, guys. That was… exactly what I expected of you. Tell me who’s the industry leader here?

What I believe the industry really needs is an equal and opposite force to Nintendo: a first party with just as much chutzpah for improving, invigorating the basic fabric of videogames, yet with its own ideology, its own concept of how to achieve this. Nintendo throws out motion-control – so that’s one idea. Great. Party #2 responds by introducing a completely different technology or theory – say, a Lego-like controller. And the two companies would have a friendly rivalry – take inspiration from each other, each continually trying to top the other.

As it is now, Nintendo is in many ways a microcosm of the game industry. When Nintendo has something to say, it changes everything. When Nintendo gets its head up its butt, so does the industry as a whole. The best solution I can offer: don’t put your faith in Nintendo, or in anyone else; just enjoy them. Listen to what they have to say, then go off and do whatever seems practical. Miyamoto is just one man. And in the battle for mindspace, he badly needs some competition.