Miyamoto Lecture On Design, Career

Thanks to Video-fenky for translating a Tokyo University lecture transcript with Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto, as originally posted on the Japanese Nintendo Cafe website. This in-depth talk discusses a cornucopia of interesting subjects, including originality ("..project documents that start out with 'If you did this and that to this other game, I think it would be really fun' are absolutely no good. Don't tell me about that! Tell the person who made that other game about it!") and job titles ("in Nintendo there aren't any official positions called 'director' or 'producer'.. [but] people overseas don't get that system. So when I started dealing with overseas folks, I wanted to sell myself to them, so I just wrote 'producer' on my business card. Later I got yelled at from the head office about assigning myself titles, but... (laughs).")

Comments

THE Class Act in the Video Game Industry

[Painaxl]

Man, the more I read what Mr. Miyamoto has to say, the more I want to pick up a 'Cube. If some other software companies took a cue from him, we'd have a lot more truly great games for next-gen systems. Even when he commented on the American gaming public, he made comments about taste that didn't make Americans out to be uneducated gamers like some other industry-types.

No wonder this guy's got so many games in the top 25 of IGN's recent list. I mean, how many game designers today would answer the question "What's the most important element in a video game today" with "Is it fun?"

BTW: What's the Super Mario Club that he referred to? Some kind of beta testers for Nintendo?

Re:Nationalistic Nonsense

[Rayonic]

Ah, I see. Well, risk-taking games appear once in a blue moon, and they're often cloned to death. The notion that Japanese developers as a whole are more innovative is an unproven illusion.

I play games from Japanese, American, European, Australian, and other companies, and it seems to me that the creativity factor is average across the globe. It is understandable that some people confuse cultural oddity (from their perspective) with innovation, and it is very easy to fall in love with one particular society, but taken too far it will only deprive you of great experiences from elsewhere.

In fact, you've really got to keep your eyes wide open, or else you'll miss some real gems. Stuff like Combat Mission, Moonbase Commander, and Natural Selection, right off the top of my head.

Actually, you could even say that Japan's slow adoption of the PC platform has put them in last place when it comes to innovation, since tons of innovation comes from independent and small-time developers. After all, it takes a huge budget to put a console game on the market, but anyone with a little skill and a dream can make their own PC game and put it out on the Internet. Those three games I listed above would never have seen the light of day on a console, for instance.