Balloon Fight (***)

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

Time was, Nintendo was a company was a game. Then Mario was a commodity was a template was a cult.

The guy who dragged Japan’s oldest hanafuda manufacturer into videogame design was a quiet, oddball toy inventor named Gunpei Yokoi. Thanks to Yokoi, Nintendo had already been making “inventive and strange” toys and arcade amusements; in the late ’70s, videogames were just the next logical step. He rounded up a posse, agreed to babysit a slacker friend of his boss’s family, and built from the ground up Nintendo’s first design studio: R&D#1.

Before long, the kid — an art school graduate named Miyamoto — set the editorial tone of bold colors, bolder concepts, and boldest character design. Then he graduated again to set up his own internal studio, and over the next five years completed and refined the two or three ideas he would ever have as a game designer.

( Continue reading at ActionButton.net )

The Nintendo Syndrome

  • Reading time:12 mins read

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.

NextGen’s Top Ten Years In Gaming History

  • Reading time:30 mins read

by [name redacted]

Originally published in some form by Next Generation. I was asked not to include 1999 or 2000, because the Dreamcast was perceived as a low mark in the industry rather than a high one. I was also asked to include the previous year, to suggest that we were in the middle of an upswing. So… that explains some of the selections.

In videogames, as in life, we tend to get things right about a third of the time. There’s one decent Sonic game for every two disasters; one out of every three consoles can be considered an unqualified success; the Game Boy remake of Mother 1 + 2 was released in one out of three major territories. With the same level of scientific accuracy, one can easily say that, out of the thirty years that videogames have acted as a consumer product, there are maybe ten really excellent milestones, spaced out by your 1984s and your 1994s – years maybe we were all better off doing something out-of-doors.

It kind of makes sense, intuitively: you’ve got the new-hardware years and the innovative-software years, spaced out by years of futzing around with the new hardware introduced a few months back, or copying that amazing new game that was released last summer. We grow enthusiastic, we get bored. Just as we’re about to write off videogames forever, we get slapped in the face with a Wii, or a Sega Genesis – and then the magic starts up all over again, allowing us to coast until the next checkpoint.

R&D1 does what Ninten… D’OH!!

  • Reading time:2 mins read

I think I figured it out.

I just read that Nintendo R&D#1 is no more. It’s been absorbed and folded into Miyamoto’s boring old EAD studios. This dismays me, as R&D#1 has always been the one Nintendo studio that actually interested me. (Well, I like R&D#3 also — I’ve no problem with Ice Hockey or Punch-Out.) This was Yokoi’s studio. It’s where Metroid and Kid Icarus came from. The Game Boy. The Wars series. Fire Emblem. Wario Ware, as flawed as it is (mostly for EAD-ish reasons), is one of Nintendo’s few breakthrough game concepts in years.

Now, though, it’s all EAD from here on out.

Shit.

Anyway. The SNES was where EAD, through force of sheer star power, first began to shove R&D#1 to the gutter. Mario and Zelda were Nintendo’s most popular series, so Miyamoto got priority. The SNES was his system. R&D#1 was reassigned to support the Gameboy. Note that the one real game the team made for the SNES, Super Metroid, is often cited as the one real reason to own it. Although I think it’s the most boring in the series, it’s sure head and heels above fucking Mario World or Starfox.

Again, the SNES was Miyamoto’s system. Suddenly there was no more competition. He just got his way. So this is where it all began to devolve. Nintendo just went with what was popular instead of challenging itself, internally (as had been the case previously). Refine what had been proven effective. And this philosophy bleeds out of every pore of the system. It’s like a whole system devoted to a more-competent Sonic Team.

In contrast, the Game Boy was Yokoi’s system. The DS is basically the successor to the Game Boy, and to the whole R&D#1 approach to design. This is the progressive direction, because it has to compete with the popularity of white bread.

And that’s just what the SNES is and always was: the Wonderbread console. The start of Nintendo’s entrenchment.