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.

Comments

Well...

[j0nkatz]

This this story is about trolling let me be the first to say HI!

Re:Well...

[ranjix]

ok, since we are trolling here, let me tell you that the translation was a poor one. He originally said "I could make Duke Nukem Forever" but for some reason things here always get a microsoft spin..

The thing is that it's true

[drinkypoo]

Halo is not a revolutionary game by any stretch of the imagination. One could have had the same result trivially by starting with any of the common first person shooter engines, and working from there. The fact that the same is true of Super Mario Brothers, a game made years and years ago (an eternity in video game land) is not even interesting.

Re:The thing is that it's true

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:The thing is that it's true

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd say that Pikmin was pretty original (a modern Miyamoto creation). Not to mention that SMB, much like Donkey Kong, Zelda, and a lot of other Nintendo properties were original when they were created.

Speaking ill of a legend like Miyamoto is not something I would do, and I think the guy at Bungie comes off a little arrogant for doing so.

Disclaimer: The last Nintendo console I bought was an SNES, so I don't think I could be counted as a Nintendo fanboy.

Re:The thing is that it's true

[arodland]

Actually I suspect that most people who care about RPGs not only have heard of Baldur's Gate, but can actually spell it.

Re:The thing is that it's true

[7Prime]

Different genre. There are really two different RPG genres out there and they have almost COMPLETELY different fanbases. Trying to compare the two is really absurred. I'm not particularly defending FF7 here (I think it's highly overrated, myself... although I am a fan of the rest of the series).

Where you might say, "Think FF7 is a real RPG? Try playing Baulder's Gate or Nethack", I might say, "Think FF7 is a real RPG? Try playing Tales of the Abyss or Ar Tonelico". Seriously, we're talking apple's and oranges here.

East vs. West, Console vs. PC, RPG vs. jRPG... each side takes a different spin on tabletop gaming... jRPGs concentrate on the story element, western RPGs capitalize on non-linearity. Whichever you think works better is up to the audience.

I personally would fall asleep 10 minutes into Baulder's gate. Ar Tonelico might make you do the same.

Re:The thing is that it's true

[revlayle]

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.

Re:The thing is that it's true

[theStorminMormon]

East vs. West, Console vs. PC, RPG vs. jRPG... each side takes a different spin on tabletop gaming... jRPGs concentrate on the story element, western RPGs capitalize on non-linearity. Whichever you think works better is up to the audience.

Excellent observation.

And for what it's worth, I'd like to point out that popularity is a pretty complex issue. We seem to operate under the assumption that it's some kind of direct relationship to quality or some other simplistic explanation (e.g. like how good the controls are). The modern narrative about popularity when it comes to art is that blockbusters are kind of mundane and inoffensive with enough explosions/sex/(pick your easily reproduced element to look down on) while the *real* talent shows up in indie/niche creations that you have to be intelligent/free-thinking/(pick your vaguely cool counter-cultural trait) enough to really get.

And while I'll agree that Creed and Nickelback basically suck, the Beatles and Pink Floyd were really good. So sometimes the popular stuff really is good, and sometimes the niche stuff really isn't (no example here: not looking for a flamewar).

FWIW, Halo is my favorite game of all time on any system. From NES, Sega, SNES, PS, XBOX, GC, Wii, 360 (consoles I've played) and over a decade of PCs, I prefer Halo. Why? The story. Just visit ILoveBees.com and you'll get a glimpse of the thought and talent that goes into the world creation. Does this have anything to do with how popular the game is? There's no way to know. Did they get the gameplay just right? Hit the market at just the right time? Was the story good enough to develop an initial core of fans who pushed the game to the frat boys that made it a blockbuster? We'll never know, in my opinion, and the only lesson is that oversimplifying popularity is for fanbois and trolls.

Now go listen to "Indier than Thou."

Re:The thing is that it's true

[ePhil_One]

Halo isn't really even new. It's very much a lot like the game Marathon, only with better graphics and physics.

It is by and large Marathon 4/5/6, there's plenty of evidence it takes place in the same Universe, etc, and is only separated by a large amount of time. Since they also created Marathon, this isn't a huge shock. Marathon was groundbreaking mostly in that it brought an interesting storyline to a FPS game, other than that it was really Mac;s answer to Doom. Of course, Doom was just a revampled Castle Wolfenstien 3-D, which was a 3-D version of an old Apple II game, which probably traced its roots back to the old Bezerker game (which never bothered to explain why you were in a maze running from deadly robots), which probably draws inspiration from an old movie, which was inspired by an old story, which was...

Re:The thing is that it's true

[Chosen Reject]

What are you even talking about? I played Halo before I had even heard of any hype for it. I did it solo, and co-op. The ONLY thing I liked about it better than any other game I had played was the co-op. It wasn't that spectacular, it still isn't that spectacular. There is ONLY one thing that make it so big, and that is the hype. I know people who will prattle on about it forever like it was God's gift to mankind. They can never tell me what's good about it. Every time they try I tell them about lots of other games that have what they are talking about. You want story, go to Half-Life, you want multi-player, see Counter-Strike. You might say that Halo combined those two, but I would say that when you are playing Halo for story, you are not playing multi-player and vice versa, so that point is irrelevant.

The graphics on Halo suck. At the time Halo 1 was getting really popular I got into a discussion about the graphics with a roommate. He was comparing Jedi Outcast at 1600x1200 with Halo at 640x480 and saying that Halo was better. This is the kind of mentality that most Halo fans have. To them, Halo is "Just Better(TM)." I had to just ignore him, as I've had to do with everyone else who says anything about Halo's graphics being good at all. Jedi Outcast was not even trying to be a graphics power house, it was running off an old engine and it still looked better with a Radeon 7200.

Level Design? My goodness, man, what are you smoking. Have you even played the library level? After about two minutes you don't even know which direction you're going, which direction you came from, and you can't even count how many times you've seen the exact same stuff over and over again and again. The maps on the ships aren't much better. Sure there are big areas outdoors, but those are repetitive as well, they just don't feel like it when compared to the monotony you just sustained from every indoor environment.

I don't know how the control scheme compares with other console FPS, but I didn't think it was all that great. It was fine, but the only thing I thought even worth mentioning about it was that you could throw a grenade without having to switch to that weapon. I won't get into a comparison between control schemes for PC-based and console-based games, because that's been done, and is somewhat irrelevant to why Halo was popular on a console, but there wasn't anything special about the controls.

Multi-player is kind of hard to judge. There are lots of games that have better. Comparing time played, as of right now, Counter-Strike has over 5 billion minutes of play logged each month. Adding in CS:S and CS:CZ nets closer to 7.5 billion minutes each month. Since it's inception, Xbox live has logged a total of 2.3 billion hours, or to put it in similar units, 138 billion minutes. Let's be generous and pretend that Halo 2 accounted for every last minute (Halo 1 wasn't on Xbox Live so we can't include it). It would take Counter-Strike 18 months to equal that. IOW, one game does in 18 months what an entire service does in 72. Yet we don't have Counter-strike in the headlines every couple of days do we?

That's somewhat off-topic however. The thing Halo has going for it, I conjecture, might be that it has no bots. People are forced to play with others if they are going to do it at all. But then you'd be crazy to play it on the same box. You get 640x480 divided by 4. A whopping 320x240 in all of its interlaced glory. I did that once, every one talked about how cool it was. I was too busy trying to adjust my eyes to being able to see what I was even looking at. I must say that I enjoyed my time despite the screen size, but that's called a party. It wasn't because of Halo. I would have had a much more enjoyable experience playing UT, Trackmania, or any other game where we each have our own screen, or where the screen is shared more efficiently, such as Wii sports or something. I hate to be a poor sport, but the reason we have Halo stories all the time is beca

Re:The thing is that it's true

[rjung2k]

"Halo is not a revolutionary game by any stretch of the imagination... The fact that the same is true of Super Mario Brothers, a game made years and years ago (an eternity in video game land) is not even interesting."

True, but the difference is that Super Mario Bros. was revolutionary when it was first introduced, as evident by the numerous SMB clones that followed in its wake. I'm hard-pressed to think of a popular game that played like SMB before SMB was introduced.

Halo, on the other hand, was just the latest iteration of a long line of FPS inspired by Doom and Wolfenstein 3D.

Re:The thing is that it's true

[fimbulvetr]

Sorry, the Simpsons already did that.

Re:The thing is that it's true

[JebusIsLord]

Actually, 2nd person would be if the camera was held by those you're shooting at. That would be fairly disorienting.

Re:The thing is that it's true

[aichpvee]

I never said all, I said most. I think it's more than reasonable to say that most people who love Halo have had limited or no experience playing FPS games previous to playing Halo. Of course there are exceptions, but they are in a severe minority. It's pretty obvious from talking to people who like Halo that their love of the game almost without exception increases with their ignorance of the genre. I believe an objective study would back this up and I'm prepared to undertake it if someone wants to fund the project.

It's also a possibility that they just have no experience playing FPS on a PC, where basically all good FPS games are released. Either way, it's a lack of perspective on the history of the genre that allows them to make the ridiculous claim that Halo is good, let alone great or groundbreaking or any of the other absurdities they use.

This phenomenon is almost identical to that surrounding the FF7 fanaticism. At least in the US, and probably Europe as well. I'm not sure what can account for the Japanese obsession with it, since they clearly should know better (and do given their preference for Dragon Quest), but I'm not sure anyone is really supposed to understand Japanese tastes even some of the time, to say nothing of all the time.

Re:The thing is that it's true

[Petrushka]

A few parts of Psychonauts work that way.

Not news

[Turn-X Alphonse]

Stuff like this belongs in drivel like "Hello" and over celebrity gossip magazines, NOT Slashdot.

It has no merit what so ever.

Lost in transaltion

[HappySqurriel]

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.

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.

Frank Connor Missed the Point

[Swordsmanus]

If Miyamoto has heard Connor's "retort", I'm sure he laughed. Connor could be taken seriously if he said he was coming up with something new and fun that will sell just as well as Halo. Instead he said he intends to make something that he already knows people want, by implying he's going to copy Miyamoto's years-old idea, Super Mario Bros. Given the sales of New Super Mario Bros., I don't blame him. But he reaffirmed Miaymoto's comment, not countered it.

This is irrelevant...

[__aaclcg7560]

Bungie was compromised after Microsoft bought it out. Microsoft's design theory is to copy everyone else, re-package it as something brand new, and get it right in version three.

Is Halo really that great?

[Anarchysoft]

I played Halo and Halo 2 to completion and I don't understand why they are held up as excellent FPS games. They were good, but I don't recall a single innovation and even where they were good, they were not great. The original Half-life, FarCry, Deus Ex and several others were much better. That's totally just an opinion and it doesn't mean much, but I'd like to know why Halo is considered by a fairly large population to be a great game. Perhaps more useful: would they have been considered great games if they were released on the PC but not the XBox?

Re:Is Halo really that great?

[Notquitecajun]

For me, it's the multiplayer. It's easier to get some of your boys and their XBox's together on 2-3 tv's than a LAN party where you have to tote around a PC or worry over a laptop. Setup and takedown are faster on a console.

Gameplay is relatively easy, cheating is minimal, and there are TONS of customizable options to set up whatever competition you want to do easily (the BIGGEST bonus).

Re:Is Halo really that great?

[SetupWeasel]

2. Before Halo there wasn't a single decent FPS on a console, just a whole bunch of shitty ports of PC FPS games.

Except, of course, for Goldeneye.

Re:Is Halo really that great?

[Knuckles]

but I'd like to know why Halo is considered by a fairly large population to be a great game

It came out for the Xbox and found a large population of teens that never had played another FPS.

Argument That Will Never End

[_bug_]

Halo is like the Porsche 911. The next incarnation will feature a few new tricks to give the die-hards something to talk about, but to the average Joe they just look like the same thing over and over. If you've played one Halo you know what the experience is going to be like for all the others. It's just being tweaked a bit here and there to improve the performance.

Bungie is the Porsche of the gaming world.

Miyamoto seems to look for something new with each game. Trying to find new ways to engage the user. He comes at each one with a flair and a passion. He's not doing the same thing over and over. Some games work. Some don't. But you do have a wide variety of games to choose from that caters to your particular interests.

Miyamoto (Nintendo) is the Ferrari of the gaming world.

Rounding out the analogy Blizzard is the TVR of the gaming world. Love-it or hate-it design, completely insane and riddled with problems, yet you can't help but keep playing.

Re:Argument That Will Never End

[moderatorrater]

Miyamoto is Da Vinci to Bungie's Bob Ross - both do excellent work, and while Bungie has much better hair, Miyamoto's work is more varied.

Re:Argument That Will Never End

[10Neon]

The car analogy wasn't needed, but it is people going above-and-beyond to give us these car analogies that makes Slashdot the wonderful place that it is!

They all have good points

[orclevegam]

All the game companies are good at certain things, it's just that the markets are reflective of what each company is basing their priorities on.

Microsoft was intialy trying to make the X-Box into a platform to try to force the convergence of console and PC gaming. Later when it became clear that they were really on to something with X-Box Live, they switched tactics and focused on providing top shelf online content (although the latest half hearted attempt to bring Live to Vista bodes poorly for Microsofts learning abilities).

Sony on the other hand has always been focused primarily on graphics performance. Yes they had some good games, but nothing ever revolutionary, but pretty and often fun. The primary hallmark of the Playstation platform is a shotgun approach to game development. They make as many games as they can, throw them out there and see what sticks. This approach can lead to some very good games, but also leads to some very very bad games. The primary failing of Sony is in not providing any new innovation in the latest generation of consoles. The Playstation 3 was positioned to be a multimedia convergence device, but so far the market for said devices has proved to be rather poor, and what little there is is primarily dominated by inexpensive PCs. The good news for Sony is that historically the Playstation consoles really only hit their stride after a year or two on the market, so it has the potential to outperform the competition in terms of raw power. There is also some rumbling of Sony taking online content more seriously, although whether or not they can provide a credible challenge to Live remains to be seen.

The last player on the market, and the most relevant to this article is Nintendo. Nintendo realized a long time ago that fun games, and innovative systems will out sell fancy graphics. A clear cut example of this is the origional Gameboy versus the graphically superior Gamegear. The Gamegear had a color screen and more processing power, but was more expensive, slightly bulkier, and was much more demanding on power (which resulted in it eating batteries left and right, I should know, I had one). Nintendo has always been middle of the road in terms of graphics and processing power, but what has set them aside has traditionally been their willingness to try new and innovative controls and games. Sometimes this has hurt them, and they have made more than a few products that failed spectactularly (Virtualboy anyone?), but on the other hand they have released a number of products that show some genuine innovation. I think the relative failure of the Gamecube served as a wakeup call to Nintendo, they realized that they weren't able to compete on graphics and if they were going to survive they needed to embrace the creative aspects of their game and console design more fully (prior to the DS and Wii most Nintendo products were less daring in departure from the norm of console gaming). It will be interesting to see if Nintendo can pull off the online portion of the gaming puzzle (which will be critical for all three consoles) sufficiently to keep Wii ahead of X-Box 360 and Playstation 3, of if they will fumble it and have to settle for second place.

"Rather touchy aren't they"

[u-bend]

Wow, he really comes off as downright peevish, no? I mean, even if Miyamoto's comment wasn't out of context, and he meant exactly what he said, the response turns out feeling really childish. Get a grip, dude. Your game's *really* popular. Just because somebody else says he wouldn't make it, doesn't mean you need to get your panties in a twist. And then, as a previous poster says, he basically affirms Miyamoto by saying he's going to copy an old design. Huh. I guess his PR fluffer didn't have him ready.

Different strokes for different folks

[aztektum]

I would imagine Miyamoto's games do appeal to a more broad audience. I have a hard time imagining my parents playing Halo for any period of time. However, they did sit and take a stab at Mario back when I got my NES (which I still have).

Bungie's response sounds like, "Oh yeah well... You're a poopy head!" Given cultural differences and the possibility of a hokey translation, I wouldn't take this as a slam. Just another persons opinion.

Sounds like Bungie has been an MS company for too long. If it's not the MS way, it's wrong, you suck. Look out, flying chair!

So bungie owned themselves...

[Rakishi]

I mean how else can you take that comment except that Bungie owned themselves. They essentially admitted that the best they could do as a response is to remake a 20 (?) year old game that's been remade more time than I could even count. I mean who in god's name responds to being called unoriginal by saying they will do something unoriginal.

I mean it's like watching some idiot try to debate online.

Miyamoto you wuss

[Sciros]

Psh! *I* can make Halo. I can probably make Halo with an added-in gatling gun that fires ninja bees.

Miyamoto is talking small potatoes here with his "I can make Halo" boast. Miyamoto can probably make Ocarina of Time if he tries hard enough.

I read this as..

[JustNiz]

I read this as.. Bungle vs Miamoto.

I hope Zippy and George get to kick some ass too.

Any Brits will know what I'm talking about.

Lost in translation

[johncadengo]

I lot of people are pointing out that Frank mistook Miyamoto's comment.

I think a lot of people are mistaking Frank's comment. It doesn't seem like he's retorting, as people put it, but instead making a sly-sarcastic remark. He not affirming Miyamoto's point (that he just finds what people like and makes that), he's replying to Miyamoto's remark (I can make Halo, but choose not to) with his own remark: I could('ve) made Mario, but choose not to.

Yes, he states, "We are hard at work on a side-scrolling platform game..." But we know he's not. It's obviously a joke. He could be hard at work on that side-scroller, but he chooses not to. He's hard at work on Halo. And that's that.

Not Popular?

[Gotung]

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.

How the source code of the industry looks...

[Fortyseven]

// Step off, bitch.
bool isMoreBaddassThanShiggy(Developer *dev)
{
    return false;
}

Re:Halo's popularity

[twistedsymphony]

Halo 1 for the Xbox ranks 25th for lifetime sales in the US since with 4.91million units sold
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= &publisher=&sort=America

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.

If he made an FPS

[Captain Spam]

Well, of course Miyamoto could make Halo. It's an FPS. Follow them back to History. getMisterIKnowMoreOldGamesThanYou(). getOldestFPSInMemory() and trace them forward through Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake, Unreal, and Halo, and you can pick out a fairly predictable evolutionary pattern. More graphics, "cooler" weapons, advance the engine a bit, make it more badass, good, print it, you've got a new FPS. That's not how Miyamoto does things.

Of course, if he were to make an FPS, it'd probably wind up with an engine that supported jumping puzzles in a non-intrusive way (somehow he would; I'm not the design god here). And have a quirky sense of design, not the normal "I R SPACE MERC I KILL U" layout. And the weapons would be strange and unconventional, requiring more strategy than "get the biggest gun and kill things fasterer". And...

Hang on a sec. That might rock. Miyamoto, please do design an FPS! That might be interesting!

Re:Halo's popularity

[PhoenixAtlantios]

I don't believe comparing a game that was released in a different sized market with one released today is a fair comparison at all; the gaming market has increased substantially since the days of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and the original Mario Brothers. Mario 64 sold more copies than Super Mario Kart, but does that mean it was better or that the market was simply larger? There's more people going to see movies in cinemas these days than there was thirty years ago but does that mean movie quality has increased or just the number of cinema goers?

I'd like to see a comparison between the games based on the time in which they were released, not just raw numbers.

Re:Halo's popularity

[Anonymous Coward]

Miyamoto has at least 53 games on that list. I don't know how many Bungie has on the list (at least 2), but my guess is that it's less than 53. Was it petty for Miyamoto to make those comments about Halo? Sure. Is anyone in the gaming industry in a better position to judge the merit of a game's design? Probably not.

-Lee

Re:Halo's popularity

[Kooshman]

I love how the whole context of the comment has been lost. This chain of comments gives the perfect example.

First off, it's cute, using the statistics only for America. How about we re-run those numbers on a global market? Custom-designing your game to appeal much more to a narrower demographic is always going to give you more spectacular results. Try this one instead*:
http://vgchartz.com/worldtotals.php

Note how the Halos now have their asses kicked. Sure, they're still big sellers... but note how *most* of the games coming before Halo 2 are Miyamoto games. (this is where I'm getting back to the point)

What Miyamoto's saying is that by concentrating on making really awesome, original games he keeps pumping out great games. Sure, he has the skill to make Yet Another Game, but so does every other game developer out there with two and a half brain cells to rub together. The top of the line pop studios (id, Bungie, etc.) do have better success rates, but they still have to compete with other plain-jane studios. He's saying that he's not aiming for the cheeseburger market. Sure, it provides a big hit or two... but note how most of the big hits are those revolutionary games. Even on a strictly numerical game, he's winning hands-down. Why don't more studios do that? They can't or they won't. He never actually insulted Halo-- only that Bungie was pursuing a saturated market.

(*Also, how did Metroid Prime only ship 120K units in Japan? That doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. How accurate are these numbers?)