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Yamauchi Puts the Game Industry In Its Place
los furtive writes "John Ricciardi of Video Senki has a great interview with Hiroshi Yamauchi, president of Nintendo, his "absolute favorite" for the same reason Castro is his fav head of state: "They're both firm as a rock on their issues, and they're both just so goshdarn sincere, you know?""
I loved the 8-bit NES. And even the SNES had some really cool games on it.
Metroid, Super Metroid, Final Fantasy 1-3 (american), Mario 1-3, at least some of the Zelda games, Castlevania, Mega Man...
And look at where they've gone. Nintendo dropped the ball on Metroid and Mario; in the meantime, Final Fantasy, Castlevania, and Mega Man are on Playstation.
And Zelda? Well, I heard the new ones were decent 3D remakes of the original, but that's it.
Why buy a game system that has like two or three decent games?
No, I think Nintendo has a LOT of catching up to do before they can start talking about how other people don't know how to write games, or function in the gaming industry.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Attitudes like yours really irritate me. When a developer spends their time making a game that will run on multiple platforms two thigs happen.
First the game is limited by the technology of the least innovative platform minus the performance hit of any abstraction layers etc... Second, lots of time is spent making the game work on other platforms instead of paying attention to details, and the details can make or break a game. This is why almost all games that are developed with more then one platform target to start with usually suck.
A perfect recent example of this is Oni. Oni is a great concept for a game. The gameplay is good too. But the details aren't there. The sound can get distorted or latent, when people fall down the stairs they land horizontal instead of at the slope of the stairs, the clipping sucks, they didn't spend enough time choosing their textures... The list goes on.
One last point. The console industry isn't the computer industry (yet). Lets hope it doesn't become the same. Let's look at why: The PC industry started off by making varied and innovative hardware. Then, when IBM clones came out hardware innovation stopped in the consumer space, and we've been stuck with the same outdated underdesigned hack of a hardware platform in the mainstream for the last 20 years. Now, in 2001 you have the console gaming industry with some really new and innovative hardware archetectures like the PS2 and the Gamecube. Do you really think that the software will benifit from having to run on such varied hardware? No, it wont, so what will happen is that all of the future game systems will have to be extremely similar in order to compete in the market. There won't be any innovation in the console hardware industry anymore.
It's ok if you can't get every game for every console. It's ok if you end up with more then one console. In the end there will be a larger variety of game types and amazing hardware out there. That would be great!
John Ricciardi of Video Senki has a great interview with Hiroshi Yamauchi, president of Nintendo, his "absolute favorite" for the same reason Castro is his fav head of state: "They're both firm as a rock on their issues, and they're both just so goshdarn sincere, you know?""
Well, all of those words are in English, they just don't amke any sense in that order....
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
There were dozens of genres of games invented in the past 20 years: side-scrollers, space shooters, RPGs, first-person shooters, third-person shooters, platformers, puzzle games, adventure games, turn-based strategy, real-time strategy, business simulators, dating simulators, flight simulators, and so on. There are more genres than I can count! You're saying that none of this is innovative? IMHO, the gaming industry has been amazingly prolific, especially considering the short span of time in which it has existed.
On the other hand, free software programmers have consistently proven that they are completely incapable of creating a decent game. All free software projects aiming to create a complete, commercial-quality game have been dismal failures. The only free games of note, such as Counterstrike, are those built on top of existing commercial engines. The OSS development model is good for some applications, but games are definitely not one of them.
And "threw a truly spectacular console together"? Cluestick: manufacturing hardware requires capital. Free software, by definition, will never produce hardware. So save your GPL rhetoric for a topic where it's appropriate.
Yes, you're right; there's not nearly enough innovation in games today.
The problem is that innovative games don't consistently outsell "me-too" games. Software publishers are very cautious folk, with good reason -- in any given year, 10% of the PC games make 90% of the profit.
Consumers vote with their wallets. If publishers aren't rewarded for supporting innovative development houses, then innovative games won't get made.
He's got some good points, especially about how much time and money it takes to make a game today. That is killing the PS2. If a developer doesn't have a blockbuster with a PS2 game, they lose money. That's one thing that Nintendo is doing with the GameCube, making it easy to program for. Maybe XBox will be easy too, since it's basically a PC.
I also like his comments about ports of games to other platforms. While this makes a lot of sense to developers, in the end, if all games are out on every platform, there is really nothing to differentiate them. Nintendo has always had strong 1st and 2nd party developers who can assure exclusive games. Microsoft is trying to do that by buying lots of companies, but how much of the stuff that they do will be exclusive to the XBox? Won't most of it get ported to the PC as well? Sony has had a great relationship with Square, but most of the games for PlayStation are made by 3rd party developers, and are usually ported to other platforms.
Don't forget that Friday is Hawaiian shirt day.
Attitudes like this irritate me. Why focus on the hardware when, really, all the interesting stuff is in the software? Contrast to the computer industry in the 1980's: IBM figured they could make billions by making better hardware (i.e. PS2) when all the money turned out to be in the software (i.e. Micro$oft). It seems to me that hardware is becoming less and less relevant, it's the software that will really drive innovation in the games industry, especially if cross-platform console games start to get developed en masse. Nintendo's attitude of "if you want to play a Nintendo game, you must buy a Nintendo system!" seems really backwards.
[Off Topic]: on an unrelated note, what the hell is with the page layout in this article? Why display only two or three questions and answers on a page, and then provide a link to the next page? Why not just put the entire interview on one page? I hate when web sites do that!
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www.scorbett.ca
Mr. Yamauchi keeps stressing the one point that I constantly gripe about. Video games are not about the graphics. They're about the gameplay. The most recent game console I own is a SuperNES, and I have no idea in which closet it now resides. I've been too busy playing my Atari 2600 games to bother to dig it out, but I might get the urge to play Zelda again some day. Oh, the days when graphics didn't mean squat, and it was all about the fun factor! Rock on, Mr. Yamauchi!
This is not a Fugazi
>Half Life made net profits of just over $200,000
Uh, no. Half Life made FAR more than that.
The top titles still bring in lots of money, but if you don't get a hit, you probably won't recoup your development money.
John Carmack
Can someone explain to me how President of Nintendo=Ruthless Communist Dictator. Maybe I missed something in the interview.
"Technically, a cat locked in a box may be alive or dead." -Kurt Cobain
As I was ready the comments made by Mr. Yamauchi (someone who's been in the game industry longer than some of you have been alive), I realized in a lot of ways, he's very right in some of his views. I disagree slightly with the "multiple porting" thing, but his point about games and technology was dead on.
I'm not one of those "the old days were the best", but there's something to be said when the Gameboy sells about 50% of all console products, even though their graphics are hardly state of the art. Too many developers seem to feel the need to include "super-cool anti-aliasing triple buffered coolness", then come up with a game like Oni, which had some cool ideas, but obviously fell short in the gameplay area. (Hello? Keyboard map and mouse control?)
You can tell which games are the best, because their not just made to make money (I'm not so naive to believe that game developers don't want to make money), but you can sense they're a labor of love as well. No One Lives Forever doesn't have an "advanced" of a game engine compared to Quake 3, but for the story and humor it crushes the other FPS in the competition. Thief and Thief II, a pair of the best games developed for the FPS market, were hacked on for not having a highly developed graphical engine, though the gameplay (especially with Thief II, when it reached near perfect status) couldn't be faulted.
The most recent example is in Final Fantasy IX. Now, I know some people have heralded it as the second coming in console games. Yes, the graphics were pretty (Princess Garnett - oh, yes.) Yes, the music was nice. But the story got lost by the second disk, the random battles became so tedius that I just about pulled my hair out, and the final end battle was as exciting as the Richard Simmon's Chest Shaving Competition.
As for his other comments - will the gaming industry slow down? Well, with the rest of the economy, I'm sure. Then again, after the mistakes already made *cough*Daikatana investors*cough* in giving funds to new gaming startups, we'll to see if investors will be so willing to part with their cash in the future.
In the meantime, I'll just keep my eyes open, and play the games that I think are fun.
John "Dark Paladin" Hummel
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
Most game companies are just "me too" companies.
I see my limited history of gaming like this.
1980's : Mario brothers and a decade of rip offs.
Early 90's : Street Fighter II and 5 years of rip offs.
Late 90's : Wolf3D/Doom and a decade of ripoffs.
Now I know there were other great games during these times, original ones too, trust me I've played them. But this is how I have seen the gaming industry "progress."