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Bungie Vs. Miyamoto - Fight!
Last week Gamehead's Geoff Keighley interviewed Shigeru Miyamoto, and the well-known designer tossed off a mildly controversial comment. Keighley asked him if he felt as though he was losing touch with the American audience as a result of the popularity of games like Halo. GameDaily reports on Miyamoto's response: "I could make Halo. It's not that I couldn't design that game. It's just that I choose not to. One thing about my game design is that I never try to look for what people want and then try to make that game design. I always try to create new experiences that are fun to play." Bungie took exception to that, and Frank Connor retorted in his interview with Joystiq: "Yeah, well. I just want to go on the record and say that Bungie is hard at work on a side-scrolling platform game featuring some plumbers -- I'm not going to say what their ethnicity is, it's none of anyone's business -- but we took that as a gauntlet, a sort of glove slap, and we're going to respond in 2D scrolling style. That's all I'm saying." We discussed that article, along with several other pieces of Halo 3 coverage, this past Saturday.
This story is "old" (as in a couple of days) and from what I have seen the general consensus is that what Miyamoto said was poorly translated and taken out of context.
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Essentially, when Miyamoto said he could "make Halo" what he meant was "He could make a game like Halo"
I could be wrong but I think Miyamoto was saying he makes the games he does because they're the kinds of games he wants to make; he is not influenced by the popularity of a genre or series to attempt to make games like them.
Halo isn't really even new. It's very much a lot like the game Marathon, only with better graphics and physics. In fact if you look at the design of the Master Chief, he bears a striking resemblance to the cy borg you play in Marathon. They even left the words SPNKR on the side of the rocket launcher, another Marathon weapon.
Wrong: Miyamoto was a design consultant and sort of a long distance project director on behalf of Nintendo to monitor the design and development of Metroid Prime (at least the first game). In fact is, I think Miyamoto was the one that told retro to make the game first-person instead of third-person which caused some amount of the development, up to that time, to be scrapped.
A couple other Nintendo people helped with the game design also, not just Miyamoto, including the original designer, Yoshio Sakamoto.
Gamestop alone has taken something like 400,000 pre-orders for Halo 3. That just one chain of stores. And thats just pre-order. And the game won't even be out for a few months.
Halo 1 for the Xbox ranks 25th for lifetime sales in the US since with 4.91million units sold= &publisher=&sort=America
Halo 2 for the Xbox ranks 16th with 6.11million units sold
Metroid Prime ranks 147th with 1.92 units sold
http://vgchartz.com/worldtotals.php?name=&console
Keep in mind this is all platforms for all time, competing against greats like Mario Bros on the NES, Tetris on the Gameboy, The Sims on the PC, and Grand Theft Auto on the PS2. Ranking 16 and 25th for all time is no small feat.
Collector's Edition
A few parts of Psychonauts work that way.