Very sad news. A true hacker. Started programming on a programmable calculator, with which he made games for his classmates. After he got himself a Commodore PET, he went to Nintendo claiming he can make games for them, and so he did.
> Iwata: Disassembling! Wow, that really brings back memories. I remember getting my first computer, which was a PET, and disassembling it to try and analyze it. We didn't have printers at the time, so I wrote everything on the screen by hand. I really can't believe I did that. (laughs) That's how I found out what was going on inside.
> Iwata: It just so happens that a computer and the Famicom system had a similar CPU. That's why when I started working with Nintendo, I knew about the 6502 better than anybody else in the company.
Iwata was apparently a legendary programmer. We've learned bits and pieces of his prowess in translated interviews over the years.
Iwata was a lead programmer on Earthbound/Mother 2 (my favourite game of all time). The game went through a troubled development and if you trust the impressions of Itoi, the lead designer, Iwata's incredible skills saved the game from cancellation. An Earthbound fan translated a Famitsu interview from Mother 2's initial release where he talks about programming a bit. https://yomuka.wordpress.com/2011/12/24/weekly-famitsu-septe...
EDIT: More here: http://earthboundcentral.com/2013/03/itoi-iwata-discuss-moth...
“When I’m parting with a friend, regardless of the circumstances, I find it best to just say, ‘See you later.’ We’ll meet again. After all, we’re friends.
That’s right—nothing unusual about it. I’ll see you later.
You went on a trip far, far away, even though it was planned for many years from now. You wore your best outfit and said ‘Sorry for the short notice,’ though you didn’t say it out loud.
You always put yourself last, after you’d finished helping everyone else. You were so generous as a friend that this trip might be your very first selfish act.
I still can’t grasp what’s happened. It feels like I could still get a light-hearted e-mail asking me out to lunch at any moment—after you’ve made sure lunch wouldn’t disrupt my schedule, of course.
You can invite me out whenever you want. I’ll invite you, too.
So for now, let’s plan on meeting again. You can call me up whenever you like, and I’ll give you a call, too. I still have a lot to talk to you about, and if I come up with any particularly good ideas, I’ll let you know.
So let’s meet again.
No–I suppose we’re already meeting. Right here, right now.”
The fact that Iwata-san's passing is being mourned by so many around the world really speaks to his contributions to gaming, and also to the fact that video games are already - and have been for 30+ years - a true art form.
I'll probably post this as a separate submission, but EarthBound's programming was sublime. Most of the actual native 65C816 code was just a VM, and the actual game was written in a high-level language that targeted the VM.
Earthbound's amazing. Don't let the cutesy pixel art fool you --- there's a lot more to it than first appears. And the end game boss is, like, one of the most disturbing ever.
My only complaint is that it is a bit long. It'd be nice to have some cheats that would let you level up more quickly, in order to get through the story a bit more briskly. But even so it's totally worth playing, and has a killed soundtrack.
First time I played it as a kid, it took me about 4-5 days to play it start to finish. Now that I've played through it at least a dozen times since then, I can do it in about 2.
This is about normal for a SNES-era RPG.
The end boss is maybe one of the best end bosses I've ever seen in a game, the music is absolutely amazing, and the characters are wonderful.
I don't want to say anything more because not only will it be a spoiler, but it may not even make sense out of context... and once you play Earthbound, you will know exactly what I mean.
I still haven't played earthbound (iirc it wasnt published in europe) and I'm thinking of trying this romhack which apparently improves the controls. Can anyone whos played the original comment if this is a good idea?
The trouble with buying them legally is you can't mod them. Well, I guess you could buy it and then just to find a ROM and hack that and be morally in the clear.
Mother is basically unplayable in 2015. The encounter rate is beyond ridiculous. I'm a little surprised they released it unmodified. Shortly before the official Nintendo release this year, someone put out a great hack that makes the game actually enjoyable. If you're going to play Mother, play this version.
If we're posting romhacks, this super metroid hack is absolutely amazing. An entirely new tileset, an all-new much larger map, new mechanics, AI, it could be super metroid 2. Highly recommended if you enjoyed the original. Oh, and the ending. The ending!
I can't speak to the quality of that hack, but it does sound like a godsend. In the original, you have to open the menu to talk to someone (Menu -> Talk To) or to open something (Menu -> Check). Yes, they're separate commands. You can't talk to a chest, and you can't check a person. If you're too far away, it pop up a dialog saying "No problem here" that you have to dismiss and navigate the menu to try again. It's crazy annoying.
I remember waiting for it to come out after reading everything about it in Nintendo Power for months (even to the point of asking them why the Octopus Eraser turned into a Pencil Eraser). It was a great and funny game. I'm glad he saved it, because a lot of us have enjoyed it over the years.
That game really rewards exploration. There are hilarious jokes hidden everywhere... even on the back of billboards :)
> Iwata: That was fun for me, too. At the time, when someone came to me and said, "I'm having trouble because there isn't enough memory," I was—to be honest—really happy. (laughs) Seeing if you could achieve programming for the same functions with a smaller amount of memory was one way for a programmer to show off.
> Miyamoto: We were like, "If we just leave it to Iwata-san, he'll take care of it." (laughs)
This quote is great and especially in the Japanese where showing off is generally frowned upon at all cost (lest you do it in subtle, generally sneaky, sociably acceptable way).
There's a reason the Famicom (NES) CPU was similar to the 6502 -- Ricoh copied it. They removed the BCD mode because it wasn't necessary on a game console and more importantly, MOS's patents only covered that portion of the logic.
I don't remember if there's evidence for this, but I believe the experience of Iwata and the rest of the HAL Laboratory crew with the 6502 led to them choosing it for the Famicom system. There are certainly plenty of PET and VIC-20 games they developed, including this one with his name hidden in it:
I love that. All that corporate maturity and yet the young gamer lived on. He was the perfect Nintendo president. How are they going to fill those shoes?
I'm not so sure. I spent the last few nights with my 14 and 16 year old kids, playing Mario Cart, Mario Party, and Mario Bros, and loved every second. Maybe it's our expectations that are off.
I still enjoy Nintendo's games the most by far, even at 31. They don't usually try to be edgy or contrived, or mask mediocre gameplay with ridiculous stories - they are usually light on story, and mostly about the fundamentals of player interaction.
I know many who agree with me, including plenty of friends at their 20s up to their 50s - Nintendo's legacy often shows up in their works today, whether it be in the game industry, or the music industry. Iwata had a large part in that, from the Mother series (Earthbound), Kirby series, and Smash Bros. games - I think he was also involved in my favorite game series, the Panel de Pon/Tetris Attack/Puzzle League/etc. series. It is a sad day :( .
I agree. Mario Kart 8 is absolutely, hands-down one of the best games ever made. The controls are perfect, it has an insanely high replay value, the challenges are well-balanced, and it's absolutely gorgeous. They did a fantastic job.
The splitscreen is a vertical split, as opposed to a horizontal split, so both players become unable to accurately drift turns because you can't actually see where you are going. Half of your camera is your Kart and the other half is the sky. Rather than being able to see the road.
That's my own gripe with the game. Why offer splitscreen if the game becomes unplayable?
If it was split the other way it would be worse, vertical FOV is just as important as horizontal FOV on most of the tracks in MK8. I cannot imagine Rainbow Road with horizontal split, it would be terrible.
Well, the games they make are undoubtedly fantastic. But....as a company they lose money. So there are two sides to that coin. I think the most common argument at the moment is that they could have easily released a game like Mario Kart 8 on PS4/Xbox One and they would have made many many times more money, but because they have released it on a platform that sold incredibly poorly they are not doing as well as they could have been doing.
Actually no, they went back to profit in the 2014-2015 period (and since their first report in 1981, the 3 years period 2011-2014 is the only time they had yearly losses)
It's not that either, they're really not edgy enough these days. I don't mind last-gen graphics, but I'd love to see something else rather than franchise sequels. The wii move made them going a weird road of 'family, fun and simple' (and profitable); the wii u attempted to get back into capable hardware but failed to bring money. Maybe the NX will be the right blend.
It is always amazing for me to read about Nintendo's history, especially during the 80s and when they released the NES. It is even more amazing when you think about everything that has changed about gaming since then.
It is kind of sad to me that the newer generation does not get to grow up playing old school games like Final Fantasy and Zelda. Some of the games these days really focus too much on graphics and not gameplay. I felt a lot of games back then were much harder and more unforgiving than games today.
i find graphics and environment are actually much nicer in games with "no 3d engine".
they're not nearly as detailed, but they're just more artistic/pleasant, as if more time was spent in that direction to "compensate" for the lack of detail
2D games are usually more detailed than their 3D counterpart.
I was thinking a long time about why I prefer 2D games to 3D ones, at least in terms of visuals. The conclusion I reached is that it's because technological limitations you get to see in graphics. Models are made from low-poly meshes, and you can (still) see the straight edges where you know they should be curved. Textures are too low-detail; stand next to a wall or close to any entity in a 3D game and you'll always see the texture upscaling, lack of detail.
Most of 3D games try to go for "realistic" visuals, but they never cross the uncanny valley. 2D games seem to look prettier to me because they don't set up expectations - so as long as they have consistent art style, the brain doesn't complain much. Moreover, in 2D productions artists usually have full control of every pixel displayed on screen, so the art can be (and usually is) very detailed. The limits that 2D environment places are more strict than limits of available technology, so your experience doesn't get ruined by jagged edges and texture upscaling.
That's why I still like the original StarCraft more than StarCraft 2 and think that introducing 3D graphics was a bad decision - the original art style looked serious, dark, had an atmosphere. SC2's style is dominated by clunky 3D models which look more like child's toys than serious hardware. But then again maybe this was made on purpose - the plot of SC2 seems about as serious as the graphics, which is not at all.
Part of the reason Nintendo was not hungry to jump on the 3D bandwagon. Most of the 3D games on PS1 launch were very hazardous, messy and bland. If it wasn't for the technology prowess of the day nobody would have bought them.
Actually, Nintendo were releasing 3D games even before the PS1. Starfox was the first poly 3D game from Nintendo and was released in 1992, at least a year, maybe more, before the PS1.
Lets not confuse a 2D game using 3D models with one that allow free(-ish) movement in 3D space.
Starfox was a rail shooter that used 3D models rather than scaled sprites.
the more complicated stuff came with third person shooters and similar. Where you either had fixed cameras, thus having the controls shift between "cuts", or the camera on its own control (tap your head and rub your tummy style).
Mario Kart N64, Super Mario N64 and Goldeneye N64? All 3D game not made by sony at the time of the PS1? Maybe the best in the world? 3D is awesome when made correctly and not trying to reproduce a movie.
It's somewhat amusing to think of the N64 being cited when the parents replied to are about 3D environments complicating the control schemes.
Most of the people who encountered the N64 did not know how to hold the controller at first glance. This was made worse by the fact that practically every game has a different idea about how the controller was to be used. Nintendo had to settle a court-case by distributing gloves to players complaining of friction injuries.[0] .
This was mostly because developers didn't know how to deal with the control schemes of 3D environments very well, and Nintendo was planning for what they considered to be needed in the future : more controls.
There's very likely a reason that the M shape was never used for controllers again, however it did leave a lasting legacy in the form of trigger buttons (not shoulder buttons), which are now practically a universal controller feature.
I really liked the N64 controller --- I still think it's one of the most comfortable ever. The asymmetrical shape when using it analogue mode felt really nice in the hands. I've never felt happy with the dual-stick PS ones.
I'm pretty sure I saw someone being vapourised by one in an episode of Lexx, too.
I've always felt like I need 3 hands to use it. It is like 2 controllers welded together. In more complex games I have to constantly change my grip from the outside left to the middle position and I've just never gotten used to it.
...there are games which use the analogue stick and the D-pad? They shouldn't do that --- you're supposed to hold it either by the two outside wings, with d-pad and buttons; or by the middle and the right-hand wing, with analogue stick and buttons. Using the analogue stick and the d-pad makes no sense, for exactly the reasons you say.
Okay, let me rephrase: the N64 controller has designed for people with at most two hands. Use the d-pad with the left hand and the analogue stick and trigger with the right hand is fine. Requiring the use of the buttons as well is not.
There were occasionally minigames in Mario Party or similar games that required you to rotate the control stick as quickly as you could - the stick was not padded, so you could really hurt your thumb (or the palm of your hand, if you chose to use that).
I'd imagine the friction lawsuit had something to do with that.
Come on the N64 came far later, and that was my point. And it was all over the place how Mario 64 gameplay was tailored, camera viewpoint and everything. Many games at the PS1 launch had the cam lost in translation somewhere between polygons, or just point at a weird angle.
Usually smaller scale indie games are the ones doing it, big shot studios feel the need to go ham on graphics. Here's a handful I managed to scrape together from memory and quick searches, but it's easy to find more.
There _has_ been quite a few retro-style, pixelated graphics style games to come out of that sector for one reason or another, but ignoring that, the games tend to have a more stylized feel to them. Limited fidelity means the games need to more creative, but I think that tends to just come with works of passion from smaller studios.
Let's throw in everything Way Forward is doing as well, such as the Shantae series of games.
It's been awhile since I've played a sidescroller that warranted multiple playthroughs, but I picked up Shantae: Risky's Revenge up in one of the HumbleBundles, and I loved the hell out of it.
One part Castlevania, one part Megaman, one part Metroid.
It was so good I went out and bought an XBox One controller to play it further, even though I don't own an XBox One. Side note: apparently its the best PC gamepad you can find that has a good D-Pad; the D-Pad is probably the best one I've used since my childhood.
Oh wow. It's actually plus-shaped. I've been looking for a PC controller with a plus-shaped D-pad for a while. They've been rare for a few years, due to Nintendo's patent on plus-shaped D-pads, but that expired in 2005.
Yup, and I actually had bought a XB360 gamepad... the D-Pad was mushy and horrid, returned it immediately for the XBOne one and it's a well built solid controller.
Also, I don't need to put batteries in if I run it off wired USB, so theres also that.
Been enjoying the hell out of Nidhogg recently. Some other notable ones are Mark of the Ninja and Bastion (maybe? I don't know if you're counting 2.5d games. included it because its absolutely, stunningly, beautiful. seriously worth looking in to)
Nidhogg is amazing :)
My goto answer for addicting 2d game is Binding of Isaac.
I own a bunch of retro consoles and games, pretty much all by Nintendo and have always wondered if there's an interest in "let's play" of an original Legend of Zelda and so forth (I'd guess most are done via emulator but that just doesn't feel right to me :P).
Would require buying a hardware capture device that's Linux compatible but those are 1in the 50-200 Euro range. I'm feeling like it would be something I'd have a blast with but not sure.
Also, all kinds of strategy games. Eg Europa Universalis 4, any Civilization game (even though they may look 3d these days, it's not why you play them).
Re: EU IV, I'd really like to get into it, but the in-game tutorial is very, very bad. I've had several tries over the last year, but always gave up way to soon.
Is there a practical intro somewhere? One that allows me to actually play a game, even losing it badly, but not encounter half a dozen "huh, I have no idea what that means and what I should do now" situations every turn.
You could try some videos as bookwormAT suggested, alternatively (or in parallel) you can just play as one of the easy nations (Ottomans, Spain, Portugal, France, etc) and blunder about. The Ottomans are nicknamed Easymans by the fans.
That's how people learn Dwarfortress, which is even less penetrable. Remember, losing is fun.
I have nothing against losing, but the UI has dozens, if not hundreds of buttons at any time, most very inconspicuous (oh, that's a button?!), and no way to guess what they are for. It's... frustrating.
I'm pretty sure every one of those games except Papers, Please and Hotline Miami, and maybe even those because I don't know much about HaXe or Game Maker, is made with a 3D engine (Unity, XNA/MonoGame, whatever). I mean, you namedrop Sunless Sea, but they do an absolute ton with 3D effects to create the desired look of the game.
Yes, they're made with a 3D engine because the platforms and the widely available frameworks are all 3D. However, the games themselves, the gameplay, and the primary aesthetics of the games are not 3D and would be just as home in a 2D or 2.5D engine and hardware with at most minor changes to the visual look and feel of the game.
These games are fully 3d modeled and in no way a 2d game. Their gameplay may be portable to a 2d platform, but they are not 2d. The is a significant difference in terms of development.
You left out Axiom Verge. Fantastic game in my opinion with really nice looking environments, and all the more impressive considering one guy coded EVERYTHING in the game, including the graphics. The tileset is a pretty accurate tribute to Metroid/Super Metroid
Literally every single game you named was made using a 3D engine. They just went for a 2D top-down view and pixelated graphics,but internally they are all rendered using OpenGL/DX and orthographic cameras.
Well of course, but like I said - the games are made using 3D engines,which use OpenGL/DX to render the scenes. The reason why I point it out is that in both of these APIs if you want to make a 2D game you still operate within 3D space - you just use orthographic cameras and have your Z coordinate set to 0.
This is getting a bit pedantic. Yes, even in DirectX the 2D API was deprecated in favour of 3D one. But the source of a difference isn't the flavour of API you use, it's whether you go full 3D, with polygon meshes, (usually) trying to be "realistic" vs. going with a single perspective and animated sprites.
You seem to be very keen on holding to that OpenGL/DX reference, and I am not fully sure why, it's not relevant to the point I was making. Maybe I should have just said "these games are rendered in 3D space, using 3D engines, and APIs which are used for 3D work normally, so they are not 2D games in the same way SNES games were 2D". Would that be better?
Yes, we get it, but it's still wrong and irrelevant. Not all of those games use 3D engines (Shovel Knight?) and I'm pretty sure not all of them even use a 3D API. But even when they do, they're still 2D games with 2D based gameplay, 2D collision detection etc.
Yep, Indie games are a gold mine for great/unconventional art and design, as well as original gameplay mechanics. Some ones I've enjoyed: Limbo, Thomas Was Alone, Cave Story, Braid, FEZ.
They have access to the games we played but that doesn’t mean they actually will. Many of these have “not aged well” and it’s really hard for the newer generation to look past the graphics, sound and gameplay and have fun with them compared to what you can play today.
I do somewhat agree, and the trends in modern gaming (generally speaking, making games easier or hold the player's hand more) make older games a tough ask for today's generation.
I'm susceptible to this myself, I played through the Resident Evil 1 remake on the Gamecube when I was probably 12-13 and managed to beat it a couple of times. I tried to pick it up again recently with the newest remaster and found it brutally difficult (as I suspect it always was, but I feel sensitive to it in an age where CoD regenerating heath and cover systems make games very easy)
When the Ducktales Remaster came out there were so many younger reviewers that were giving the game low scores because it was hard. And it is hard.
But then, let's see these kids play the NES version of the Ninja Turtles game. You know, the one with the dam level where you have to diffuse the bombs.
Oh god. I bought an NES to play Final Fantasy, and it came with Ninja Gaiden. I never managed to beat it, and always got stuck on something like the third-to-last level. Rarely have I played so frustrating a game.
I remember playing the Terminator game on the Master System when I was about 8, getting so frustrated by it that I rolled off the couch and put my back out for several weeks.
I got hold of it recently to see if it was really as hard as I remembered.
This may just be me, but I feel like 2D ages so much more gracefully than 3D. Especially the PS1 era.
I can look at a game like Tales of Phantasia and bask in how beautiful everything looks, even at 256x224 on that limited hardware. I can even go way back to the '80s on PC-88 titles like Undine and have a lot of fun.
But I load up Grandia and ... oh dear. I know it's a great game, everyone says it's wonderful, but it looks absolutely dreadful.
I think the early 3D systems were the worst for holding up. I can load up pretty much anything that was released on NES, SNES, GameBoy, MegaDrive, and still have an absolute blast. I am sure that if you gave Super Mario Bros to an 8 year old now, they would still enjoy it. But any of the early 3D games are just so visually jarring I can't force myself to play more than a short while before I turn them off. Especially with the early, horrible 3D controls. Even the games which I loved when I was young - Metal Gear Solid, Mario64, Wipeout - they are all unplayable for me now.
The gameplay on mobile games mirrors many of those older games, and I think eventually Nintendo will give in and start publishing their catalog there. I think if Super Mario was released on iOS and Android, it'd blow Angry Birds numbers out of the water. (though maybe I'm just hopeful)
> The gameplay on mobile games mirrors many of those older games
If only. There are exceptions but the vast majority of mobile games that "make it" have very simple and mindless gameplay. Games like Super Mario/Metroid/Zelda do exist on mobile but very rarely do well, and as a result not many people make them. It's nothing at all like the 80s/90s.
I just wish phone controllers would start selling enough that more developers would design their games to use physical buttons for gameplay and touch for menu selections etc. Are the current options just that shitty?
I considered buying one when I had a 5S, but decided against when it leaked that the 6's would be bigger. Don't know if the situation's changed.
Physical buttons are complex to make and expensive. And bulky; when not playing a game you still have to use up space on the phone for them.
Not that I don't agree with you --- I do; gaming on phones is a miserable experience. You do get game controllers for phones, but they're frequently awful and game designers can't assume that people have them so they have to design for playing on the screen anyway.
I'd rather just game on my 3DS or PS Vita instead - phone battery life is still miserable with intense games, and performance is also questionable.
Phones are just not built to be a good gaming platform as is, and I am not convinced they will be comparable in experience for at least another decade, if not longer. The technology isn't optimal yet.
So many people have tried that I feel compelled to say, "prove it." SMB1, SMB3, SMW, and even Mario 64 all require remarkably precise controls for movement--and I tend to think that moving away from that sort of precision of play moves away from something intrinsic to Super Mario games.
Maybe we need to look towards the DS for inspiration. At the beginning, the touch aspect was heavily promoted and a lot of games came out with only touch controls, that worked mostly well. On the other hand, the DS has one very important feature - a stylus with a sharp point. Even if you do get a stylus for your phone, most have very wide ends, nothing like the precise pen that came with the DS. I sometimes wonder whether if mobile phones had all come with styluses, we'd have better games.
Perhaps. Would you be willing to pay ~$40 for it though? I don't believe the profit margins are high enough on mobile games to be interesting for productions like Pokémon or Mario. More likely, the mobile games will be free-to-play crapware utilizing existing Nintendo trademarks.
I would pay up to £30 for a Zelda or Mario on my phone. Why not? I've paid that for cart versions for years, and they don't get the attention they should because I don't carry a GameBoy everywhere any longer.
If enough people reason like this, then yes, there is a possibility that Nintendo will release quality games for phones. I doubt that will prove to be the case though.
Seriously, most games are finished in a month if they're good and maybe 2 if they're not. So lets go with $.99/Month on the mobile model.
Unless it's one of the endless time suck games like current mobile games, eg dudes fighting castles, or some big online multiplayer on PC you're not really getting a multi month subscription out of it.
The poster boy in this thread, any mario game, is maybe 2 months, 3 in spurts. That's 3 @ .99, 6 @ 1.99, or 9 @ 2.99. None of which gets you even close to what they were making.
And none of those games will hit the same scale as the dudes n castles games will because those games are simple time wasters with little barrier to entry, eg no skill required. You have to limit max players BEST CASE for your great yester year at the same for any console game, eg maybe 10M players max. If they all played for 3 months at max price your best case is 100M, but more likely 10-30M best case. And likely lower. Eg console numbers is console numbers.
These games cost 10M + to develop these days even great 2d ones because they're still modelled in 3d for parts of it. This isn't the multiple order of magnitude payback the mobile folks are getting on their hits with their quick iterate and the dogfight for the winner.
>It is kind of sad to me that the newer generation does not get to grow up playing old school games like Final Fantasy and Zelda
They're on the e-shop on the 3DS and WiiU, as well as sold in game stores, just as game cases that are for download codes. I'm pretty sure the newer generation is exposed to them.
"Games back then were much harder and more unforgiving"? Man, most modern blockbuster games require marksmanship skills way beyond what '80s games ever demanded. Open world, nonlinear plots... You just can't compare recent stuff with side-scrolling shoot-em-ups or roguelikes.
Some games might have felt unforgiving because technological limitations (no saves) or commercial considerations (coin-op first, home later) forced players to repeat procedures over and over again. This is not something to celebrate. I hope my kids will never have to spend the same amount of time and money I wasted on the first 8 levels of WonderBoy II.
The card game "War" takes skill if you play it competitively. That doesn't mean it's a hard game.
If you play a game competitively, you play against other people. That will always take skill. The conversation going on above is about playing against the game itself, not other people.
Any coin-op was obviously trying to walk a tight rope between maintaining user engagement and making it hard enough that you would have to spend significant sums for training purposes. Otherwise you might as well give players 999 lives.
Proof: there is no technological limitation for modern coin-ops regarding saving state, but games actually implementing some sort of saving mechanism are still few and far between (and even then, saving features are almost invariably another way to force players to buy add-on gizmos...).
There's a long running series of interviews called "Iwata Asks" where Iwata would interview various Nintendo game developers around the time of their latest game release. Iwata certainly doesn't ask very hard hitting questions, but nonetheless they're interesting looks behind the scenes of Nintendo development and well worth reading.
It's really painful to hear something like this, Mario and Zelda was my childhood, and I play the most recent Animal Crossing on my 3DS still. I hope his family understands how many childhoods he impacted.
Funny picture, when asked to draw Kirby. Artists vs Programmers. Miyamoto, Sakurai and Iwata I believe. http://i.imgur.com/S5Cq9lT.jpg
It's really hard to read the text in that picture because of the JPG compression artifacts, but I did my best to try to transcribe and translate it. I'm not a native speaker of Japanese though, so if anyone sees a mistake, please correct me!
The amazing person who thought up Kirby's Dream Land!
Although he's the youngest of the development staff,
when it comes to making interesting games, he won't lose
to anyone. An idea man of few words.
He made series such as Super Mario and The Legend of Zelda.
He's famous! But you already knew that, right? For this
Kirby, he took on the roll of producer.
He's the great person who practically made Nintendo's golf game! Due to everyone's enthusiastic encouragement, he was both a programmer and a producer for Kibry.
Last one should be: "The amazing guy who wrote pretty much the entirety of Nintendo's golf game. For Kirby, on top of cheering everyone on as a producer, he ended up doing programming too."
Thank you for the correction. If you don't mind, could you please explain the grammar of "はげましなから" since it seems I was mistaken in interpreting that construction? (I thought it was "because of encouragement".) In particular, that な is confusing me now.
I feel so sorry to hear this. I have been a long time fan of Nintendo. RIP Iwata san. We will miss you so much. The rest of crew at the company will continue to carry the torch.
In addition to being CEO, one of his many other accomplishments was that he was the main programmer for Earthbound, a game close to my heart. A death like this always tragic, but the death of a fellow programmer makes it feel closer to home.
I grew up with a NES and SNES. He worked on many games that I enjoyed (during his time at HAL), the most notable of my collection being Earthbound (of which, I still have to play every few years just because of how good it is).
Cancer of the bile duct? If so, its nearly always fatal. By the time the lump is big enough for someone to go to the doctor to get it checked out, its always stage 4, terminal and inoperable. Only way it turns out differently is when a surgeon is poking around in there for some other reason and stumbles across it. Mostly kills people in their 70s and 80s or older so there's not much research done on it.
Same as a friend of mine lasted. Doc gave him 9 months.
EDIT: and I think he was lying a bit about the diagnosis in that letter, or else his docs were lying a bit to him. That may have been what he wanted to believe. If it was discovered "routinely" outside of surgery it was stage 4 to begin with, and there wasn't any hope, and it was probably inoperable (the fact that he got an operation and only lasted 12 months suggests the op didn't do any good).
Not really casting aspersions on him, though, just cancer is really shitty, and this one particularly bad.
I wonder if the Wii and the DS are used as case studies in business schools. Smaller company playing a disruptive strategy against giant competitors.
I also think it's equally impressive how Nintendo always lived to fight another day... seems so many technology firms have one or two hits then get wiped out when a new product under-performs.
> Smaller company playing a disruptive strategy against giant competitors.
Although before that, Nintendo owned the games console industry, so it wasn't exactly a small startup. It had market-leading software franchises to sell its hardware.
> seems so many technology firms have one or two hits then get wiped out when a new product under-performs.
Absolutely true. It's one of the main reasons why the IBM PC (running DOS) and then openly-licensed Windows came to dominate the PC market rather than Acorn, Apple, Commodore (Amiga), Sinclair and hundreds of other proprietary manufacturers.
That was never a viable strategy in the games console market because most consoles were sold at a loss, ie software sales subsidized hardware sales.
Hardly. Nintendo was already one of the (if not the) major video game companies. Mario was a household name, they had hundreds of millions of games shipped, they made such massive hits as the NES, SNES, Game Boy, not to mention making literally dozens of celebrated timeless games.
It's a bit ridiculous to try to paint the picture of a small company upsetting the balance and applying the "disruptive" buzzword to 2000s Nintendo.
As for living to fight another day, well, that's the price of innovation. For every Wii, there is a Virtual Boy. For every Ocarina of Time there is a Phantom Hourglass. Not every bold move pays off, not every innovation is well received. Fortunately for Nintendo they never stopped innovating and taking risks. The times it paid comfortable offset the times it didn't (like the current gen Wii U). Besides that, they have extremely valuable IP they can cash on (Mario, Pokémon, etc).
1.Nintendo was a much 'smaller' company than Sony and Microsoft, who had many other businesses besides video games. The video games industry in the 2000s was far bigger than it was when Nintendo dominated it in the 80s and 90s.
2. The Wii is practically the definition of a 'disruptive strategy.' They stopped trying to compete on what was previously considered key (specs, AAA games) and instead focussed on adding a radical new dimension to gaming (motion sense controller).
This is terrible news. My sincere condolences to his family.
Five years ago, I read (and saved) a series of fascinating interviews about the development of the Wii. Some of them were on the Nintendo corporate sites (see https://web.archive.org/web/20100612175931/http://wii.ninten...) while others were from Japanese magazines that a colleague translated. It was really a remarkable tale — Iwata was a CEO who loved to work with his engineers and designers, and in the case of the Wii, they created something that was truly innovative, and not just in an engineering sense. The following excerpt discusses the creation of the Wii remote/nunchuck:
Iwata: I still remember the first time I saw the pointer demo in one of the conference rooms. From the moment I picked it up, it just felt right. I had handled other pointer devices before, but they are not normally responsive and leave you feeling more frustrated than relaxed. The pointer idea itself was also good, but in this case it was the sense of control, the finish of the product, that was particularly good. I suppose that was the result of the technology brought in by Mr Takeda.
Ashida: Well, it was because the main controller was just a rod. (laughs) It clearly couldn't be used to control existing games. Since Wii is compatible with GameCube games, and we also had the concept of the Virtual Console, we had to make it possible to play games from the NES days, too. On top of that, we also had to consider FPS (first person shooter) games for the overseas market. These factors ultimately gave birth to the idea of combining various controllers to the main controller with an extension connector.
Miyamoto: The idea of connecting controllers spread very quickly, but the Nunchuk, which had such a strong impact when it was announced, was done much later.
Ashida: I first heard about the idea for the Nunchuk from Takeda-san. He said, “can you try to make something like this?” There were also requests from the development teams for Metroid and other software titles asking for a new kind of controller that uses both hands, that can offer a new type of gameplay. And so, yet again, we started out by moulding another clay model. (laughs)
Takeda: This idea originally came from one of the young developers involved in the project I mentioned earlier, the one aimed at selling packaged peripherals with GameCube games.
Iwata: I can still vividly recall the look of anxiety on Mr Ashida's face when he showed me the Nunchuk. What was running through your mind at that time?
Ashida: Well, I thought it wouldn't fit well with the streamlined designs of the console and controller. At first, I also considered a design similar to that of the remote. But since it was so obvious that the right and left hands are used differently, I realized that making the designs similar would just make it harder to control. When I asked for Mr Takeda's advice, he reassured me that it was fine for them to be different since they would be used separately.
Ikeda: we used to call the Wii Remote the Core Controller, or alternatively the Core Unit, because peripherals were attached to its extension connecter.
Miyamoto: Oh, that's right, we called it the Core, didn't we? But the term Core Unit doesn't sound very accessible, even though that's what we were aiming for all along! (laughs) It was Mr Iwata who insisted that the main controller be called a remote, wasn't it?
Iwata: Yes, that was something that I was unusually stubborn about. The TV remote is something always sits within reach and is picked up and used by everyone all the time. Since I wanted the controller to be used in the same way, and since it ended up looking like one in the end, I strongly believed that it should be called a remote. And also because one of the most fundamental questions behind Wii's development was why some people use the TV remote all the time, but hesitate to pick up a game controller. So I really insisted that it be called a remote.
Ikeda: n the early stages of development we ran into a number of problems that we hadn't anticipated, like the fact that the controller would react to fluorescent light, for example. Creating a mechanism that prevents the controller from responding to fluorescent light and sunlight may not sound overly difficult, but it still caused us a good deal of trouble.
Iwata: So, that's how the specifications of the Wii controller were decided. However, it wasn't until the Tokyo Game Show last year that it was unveiled to the general public. I was up on stage at that event, and I still vividly remember the silence that followed the video that introduced the controller. It felt like time was standing still... It was as though the audience didn't know how to react. Given that you'd all worked so hard on the controller, what did you think of that reaction?
Miyamoto: Like Mr Takeda, I too was very much on edge. I was certain that they wouldn't understand Wii unless they actually tried it out for themselves, and so I was unsure how convincing the presentation alone would be. Everyone was clapping, but I couldn't help but wonder whether our message had gotten across, or whether people thought it was too unconventional. However, looking at the other unveilings at the Tokyo Game Show that day, I was very much relieved by the fact that Nintendo was the only one doing something new. Everyone else seemed to be just polishing up something that everyone had already seen before.
Ashida, when asked about reax from developers: For the most part, their feedback was very positive, which was a great relief. Needless to say, there were a few cries of dissent, but most people were left with a favourable impression.
Ikeda: I was often left in charge of explaining the controller's functions, but it was only when they actually got their hands on the controller that their faces would light up. Seeing this, I really felt as though we'd scored a hit. And then, immediately after they had a go on Wii, they started coming up with ideas. Right there and then they were already discussing what they could do and how they could do it! I was amazed by the speed of this.
Iwata: Producers are more likely to pick up the controller and start thinking about its limitations. Creators, on the other hand, are more likely to look at what is possible, come up with ideas and ask a lot of questions. They'll go home with smiles on their faces, won't they?
Iwata: In bringing Wii to the world, we've filled up countless boxes with mock-ups, prototypes, trial software, and so on. But I truly feel that none of our efforts were wasted. These concepts came and went at a remarkable pace, until we came across those special technologies that solved all of our problems at once. Nowadays, nobody has any doubts about the "d-pad with two main buttons" interface. But twenty years ago many people wondered whether such a controller could really be used to play games. So, if we continue to do what we know has to be done, our controller, which now appears quite unusual, may very well become the new standard. As someone who has made it their life’s work to make innovative products, I feel very lucky to have had the chance to witness this story from beginning to end. Everyone, thank you very much.
Japanese companies are sometimes portrayed as being too conservative. However, I have found that there is a creative/innovative streak in certain firms that can lead to truly innovative products that push the engineering and creative envelopes, open up new markets, and force everyone to realize new possibilities. Satoru Iwata deserves much credit for what happened at Nintendo.
[off topic] What's really conservative in Corporate Japan is its lifetime employment system, and even Nintendo isn't immune from that. The entire society is gridlocked in that assumption and it will probably take a national upheaval to change it. I'm expecting that the change is inevitable sooner or later, and it will be very painful one.
Interestingly, China's employment system operates in stark contrast to that (perhaps even a polar opposite) -- employees are so disdainful about future prospects that they contribute to savings accounts, and related financial instruments, in droves. The combined value of such investments is staggering beyond comprehension.
Society is gridlocked in a similar fashion -- people are afraid to spend their money so much that the economy, on a national scale, is generally sluggish. Yes, extravagance is abound in the nouveau riche, however that is the exception rather than the rule.
There is a great fear that their new jobs will vanish on a moment's notice, and there is little faith in the social support systems.
Such sad news. Iwata's influence has been enormous on my childhood as well as many others. Gaming is becoming a legitimate hobby, in no small part to people like him. He truly cared about the company, the products, and the consumer. RIP
Haven't been following Nintendo very much. If he was so ill why was he still CEO? Not saying he wasn't capable but, if I were that sick, not sure I would want to be running a company.
There are some people who love their job more than many other things in this life. The CEO in question was a true gamer at heart, and i suspect that many other gamers if given the job of being CEO of Nintendo would do that their last day.
Edit: I found a PET quote from Iwata Asks.
http://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/3ds/creators/4/0
> Iwata: Disassembling! Wow, that really brings back memories. I remember getting my first computer, which was a PET, and disassembling it to try and analyze it. We didn't have printers at the time, so I wrote everything on the screen by hand. I really can't believe I did that. (laughs) That's how I found out what was going on inside.
> Iwata: It just so happens that a computer and the Famicom system had a similar CPU. That's why when I started working with Nintendo, I knew about the 6502 better than anybody else in the company.