How The Revolution Will Change Games Forever

1up.com has a lengthy article discussing the possible ways that Nintendo's next console will change the face of gaming. A nice pie-in-the-sky article for a quiet Holiday afternoon. From the article: "... We're sick of waiting, so we came up with a list of hypothetical Revolution game concepts -- some pulled directly from Nintendo's Tokyo Game Show video that showed actors but no real games, others pulled from some of the popular ideas we've heard floating around -- and took them to impartial third-party developers to find out how practical it is for games on Revolution to be more than just gimmicks. Over the next five pages, we talk with developers from Harmonix, Radical Entertainment, Foundation 9, Atlus, and Midway to figure out how many of these hypothetical game ideas that are floating around have the potential to become actual games, and what advantages/problems might come with that as a result of the Revolution's remote control-shaped, motion sensor controller."

Comments

Re:VBoy

[justchris]

Actually, if you look at Nintendo's traditional approach to console/controller design, it's easy to see why the virtual boy failed.

If you can find them, try to read some interviews with Shigeru Miyamoto from when the N64 and the GCN were first coming out.

Basically, what Nintendo has always done was this. Someone at Nintendo (most often Miyamoto-san) said, "I have this really great idea for a game! But the controller everyone is using won't work for it."

And Nintendo goes..., "Well, what kind of controller do you need?"

And Nintendo R&D goes to work. They get a prototype controller, they make their game, and the game designer says, "It still doesn't work right. You need to do this, this and this." And R&D goes back and makes the changes that the game designer suggested.

Throughout Nintendo's history, their controllers have been influenced not by R&D or management or marketing but by what the game designers need to make the games. They went to a dpad when everyone else was using joysticks, because they had a game that wouldn't work right with a joystick. They added more buttons, and especially shoulder buttons when they made the SNES because there was a game that needed the extra buttons, and having more than 4 buttons accessed by the right thumb proved to be uncomfortable and complicated, so they found a better place to put the extra buttons. Remember the N64 controller, and how bizarre it looked when your first saw it? The reason it was designed that way was specifically because of Super Mario 64. At the time, there simply didn't exist a controller that could play this game Miyamoto had been working on, their flagship title, so they made a controller that had the new features he needed, analog control, camera buttons for camera control, and easy access to thumb and forefinger buttons, but they added the 3rd prong so as not to give up dpad control, since there were still many games that worked better with a dpad than with analog.

It was Miyamoto's decision to change the button shape and design on the GCN controller as well. He wanted games to be more intuitive, he was working on Pikmin at the time, and he wanted a few things on the controller changed so the game would work better.

Now, conversely, the VBoy was designed to do 3D, but they designed and built the unit first, and then designed the games later. The only other time in Nintendo history they've done such a thing is with the Nintendo DS (I say this only because I've not heard anyone at Nintendo say they had a particular game in mind when they created the DS, but I could believe that Kirby Canvas Curse inspired the creation of the system), but they worked on enough game ideas for it, before releasing it, that they didn't run into the same problem as they did with the VBoy, which was that it wasn't really comfortable or fun (another reason I can believe they took an R&D before Game Design approach with the DS is that it's nto really comfortable to play in a game that requires quick access to all the buttons).

So while I can't say the controller will be an unqualified success, I'm optimistic because, the way everyone at Nintendo is all smiles whenever they talk about the controller, I suspect we'll learn soon that they had a game idea they were kicking around for a while, but which they simply couldn't make with the existing control scheme and voila (too lazy to find the accented i) you have the Revmote. (Which actually may be why Mario 128, which was announced years ago for the GCN, never came into existence, and is now being mentioned as being a game for the Rev.)