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BusinessWeek Interviews Miyamoto
TecnaDigit writes "This week, BusinessWeek Online features a short but sophisticated interview with Shigeru Miyamoto. Mr. Miyamoto discusses the past, present, and future of gaming (concerning both his games and games in general) as well a few interesting tidbits of his personal life." From the article: "Whether it's a new game or a sequel, we want anyone to be able to play right away. That's why I think Rubik's Cube was so brilliant. I saw it for the first time at a toy convention in Japan in the early 1980s. The moment you see a Rubik's Cube, you know you're supposed to twist the pieces. And it's beautifully designed. Even if you've never handled one, you want to pick it up and try it. And once you do that, it's hard to walk away until you've solved it. "
I quote:
his Super Mario Bros. -- the world's hottest-selling game ever -- was the first with a scrolling screen, which expanded the playing space vertically, not just horizontally
End quote. I don't believe Super Mario Brothers ever scrolled vertically. Perhaps my copy was defective. Or maybe they're talking about 2 or 3...
I know, I sound like a fanboy here but this is the first time in a long time that I've been really excited about video games. It felt like this generation of consoles weren't anything we hadn't seen before - just brighter colors, flashier logos, nothing really new. I'm thinking that the Revolution is going to feel significantly different.
Here's an interesting tidbit:
From TFA:
I've always thought that games would eventually break free of the confines of a TV screen to fill an entire room. But I would rather not say anything more about that.
Unless he meant the Virtual Boy, I wonder what he has in mind?
It only scrolled one way, to the right.
There was multiscreen vertical travel, but that was through a pipe or vine. One screen disappeared and the new horizontal level on a new vertical plane appeared. Always thought it would be neat to have a version with the same levels but you could go to the left.
The only thing I disagree with here (before I trailed off and clicked Reply) is that people seem to think that Nintendo has decided to stop compteting for the "top spot" of the console wars or that they've abandoned the hordcore/traditional gamer.
No, the only thing Nintendo has abandoned or stopped doing is playing Sony's game. They're going for the same market and more and they have their sights set on the #1 spot, only they're going after it from a different angle. I think it's refreshing to see Nintendo thinking up a completely new and original mentality to use in approaching the next generation of consoles to match with whatever new and original content they come up with this time around that the other guys will no doubt copy next time around.
"This is considered plagiarism."
It's not that Nintendo doesn't want to compete - it's that they're not playing cat and mouse with Sony and MS. Honestly, all this talk about specs, throwing out random numbers people are woo-ed by but don't mean much to them in reality (ooo my machine has 3 cores, ooo well mine has 1 core +7 spe thingies, beat that!)
Honestly, all the theoretical numbers, the teraflops, the floatingpoint-operations-per-second's, it mean's nothing. Well okay it means somthing, but remember the GCN launch? Nintendo didn't go into the nitty gritty about the hardware because the consumers don't need to know. Developers don't even need to know. Why? Theoretical limits are just that: theoretical. When Nintendo released benchmarks of the GCN, did they do what the ps2 and xbox did, for example releasing a polygon-per-second count of just rendering nothing but flat triangles? No. They released numbers based on what you could achieve in a game, with AI, sound, texturing etc, i.e. realistic numbers. The hardware platforms are so different, that one measure means virtually nothing. Sure, the PS2 can kick all the consoles and pretty much any PC at flat polygon fillrate, but it has pretty shitty graphics compared to the gamecube (metroid prime, or for a crossplatform example, RE4)
Nintendo is simply better at engineering things anyways. The GCN had something like a 400mhz cpu, and probably the lowest "numbers" of all the consoles, yet it is equal to the xbox (well, some parts not so much (shaders), but other things its better at (particles is a good example, but thats based on a lot of factors, namely its FP performance)) It's also in a much smaller housing, and doesn't sound like a windtunnel like the xbox. How did they manage this? They engineered it better. Microsoft took PC parts, threw them in a black box and called it a days work (hell, the controllers are USB, the connection has just been physically changed to not fit into normal USB slots)
Sony and MS are going for the whole shebang, all of digital entertainment. Sony has their music and movie divisions influencing it, and their consumer tech (mp3 players etc) all fighting to make the ps3 a super DRM convergance machine. Microsoft has their Windows Media Centre to sell, and whats to be the software king (things like their music store, the xbl store etc) What does Nintendo want to do? Make games. Their online model doesn't have a music store. It has demo's you can download for your DS. Old school roms you can buy (please let them be cheap) etc etc. Nintendo is focused squarely on games. The Revolution won't be a multimedia powerhouse. I doubt it'll play DVD's out of the box. Nintendo is appealing to developers, by offering them a new (awesome) method of control, but letting them use the old one (the classic controller shell) if they are too afraid. The devkit enviroment is supposedly nearly the same as the GCN, which if you've ever programmed for a console (I did a bit of DS) you know is a very good thing. The PS3 and xbox360, with their new architectures supposedly are hard to develop for (and to add to that, the current devkits for the ps3 are supposedly horrid, typical Sony style)
So, is Nintendo backing away from competition and trying to find a niche market, or find a new group of consumers? No. Although they still want the new consumers, they want the old crowd too. They just are more focused on the gaming aspect of consoles than their competitors, which I believe will let them win out in the end.
It all makes since now. I understood the part about it being like a remote to provide a familiar control method for non/new-gamers, but the intention of making something people won't be ashamed of and hide away when not in use is pure genius. I have remotes lying all around, but stow gamepads away in a drawer, even though they're wireless.
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
- In the future, what do you think video games will be like?
- It's convenient to make games that are played on TVs. But I always wanted to have a custom-sized screen that wasn't the typical four-cornered cathode-ray-tube TV. I've always thought that games would eventually break free of the confines of a TV screen to fill an entire room. But I would rather not say anything more about that.
Nintendo's next console: the holodeck!
You could have a console with the greatest specs on the planet but if the games made for it are below average or just plain bad then it won't sell.
Case in point the NEC Turbografx-16 (aka the PC-Engine), possibly one of the most successful game consoles in Asia with a game library exceeding 800+ titles "failed" in the United States. This is because the company released only the more average or mediocre titles in the US instead of the more groundbreaking titles that made the system a success back in Japan. For a time the PC-Engine was beating the Famicom (NES) in sales. The TG-16/PCE was a 8/16-bit hybrid with an 8-bit CPU and a 16-bit GPU capable of antialiasing. It was the first console to offer Stereo sound, some say the Sega Genesis was but the PCE came out a few years before it. The PCE was the first with CD-ROM which you added onto the console like the Sega-CD addon. For its time the TG-16/PCE was revolutionary in a day when the NES/Famicom was consider the highest in videogame technology. If only NEC and their development partner Hudson Soft used better judgement on what games to bring over to the US, the system probably would have done much better.
The same analogy goes for the next-gen system. They can be the fastest with the most powerful GPUs on the market but if the games are dull or just plain bad they won't sell well at all. The most fatal mistake companies can make is to underestimate the intellegence of their customers, and we gamers are very very smart.
Michael "TheZorch" Haney
thezorch@gmail.com
http://thezorch.googlepages.com/home
I found his love for his rubik's cube a little disturbing, but at least that explains the name of the Gamecube...