Nintendo's secretive creative process | Hacker News Reader

Nintendo's secretive creative process

amp.theguardian.com

161 pointsgyre00751 comments

“The thinking that guides us is: what can we do to pleasantly surprise players? It’s not that we’re consciously trying to innovate; we’re trying to find ways to make people happy. The result is that we come up with things other people have not done.”

Love this. Focuses you without restricting what you’re doing. We have a now 10 year old app/social community that we’ve been trying for several years to grow/innovate. In past years, we focused on growing revenue, which we needed to do to pay the bills. It helped some but not as we expected. Recently we decided to double down on our product, innovating our community and app to try help users. I really like the concept of “pleasantly surprising” our users. Will be putting that into play.

Care to share a link? I’m interested in community software and how the market will evolve to serve these groups.

Reminds me of the way Bezos writes about Customer Obsession in his letters to shareholders:

"There are many ways to center a business. You can be competitor focused, you can be product focused, you can be technology focused, you can be business model focused, and there are more. But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of Day 1 vitality. Why? There are many advantages to a customer-centric approach, but here’s the big one: customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don’t yet know it, customers want something better, and your desire to delight customers will drive you to invention on their behalf. No customer ever asked Amazon to create the Prime membership program, but it sure turns out they wanted it, and I could give you many such examples. Staying in Day 1 requires you to experiment patiently, accept failures, plant seeds, protect saplings, and double down when you see customer delight. A customer-obsessed culture best creates the conditions where all of that can happen."

> obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of Day 1 vitality.

It's a nice way to look at it, but then it's hard to explain why they force-feed Amazon Fire TV Sticks as a poor man's alternative to Chromecasts and prevent Chromecasts from being sold on Amazon at the same time. Costumer focus much?

They are focused on their customers, not Google's.

I bet a huge chunk of their customers is Google users/customers as well.

Also how they force-feed you Prime Video and make you pay extra for it (compared to Prime prices before they launched this) even though you already have other streaming services or generally not interested in it at all.

Not to mention how many consoles are sold by third party and are imports.

I’ve stopped buying expensive electronics on Amazon. It’s too much of a pain to deal with. I will buy cheap junk because at least I am paying for what I’m getting.

> I really like the concept of “pleasantly surprising” our users.

Except that when users complained about the WiiU not being fun or remotely interesting, nobody listened at Nintendo and they kept marching to release it as is.

It's nice to have narratives, but when facts don't match it, it's just a nice PR story and nothing more.

Nintendo have released some turds of consoles before (Virtual Boy, N64, Wii U) but they all had some good games.

Super Mario 64 was the first 3d platformer and it is still fun and innovative now. The only thing dated about it is the camera control and it’s not that bad.

> N64

In what universe is the N64 a turd?

(I am asking objectively, not as a frothing-at-the-mouth fanboy.)

I like the N64, but for the sake of argument (from a few different directions, and each one debatable whether it made it a "turd"):

- Sony moved over three times as many Playstations, and there were about 2600 PSX games and 400 N64 ones. In contrast to the previous generation, the SNES handily outsold the Genesis, even with somewhat fewer released games.

- The cartridge format caused problems with production price and storage potential, which disk-based systems didn't have

- It was an overly-complex, difficult-to-program machine

- The 4K of texture cache and other weird design choices really hampered the graphics quality.

Aha. That's the answer I was looking for.

All fair points, all objectively true. Thank you!

In the era of optical media and hardware-accelerated 3D graphics, N64 was still using cartriges. They were expensive and offered little space, so a non-trivial amount of hackery was needed to even squeeze a soundtrack there. In fact, all N64 development was arcane magic due to this.

I think if would be a bit of fun to see a revival of cartridges. Though just jam a 250bg ssd in it and bang! big games and no restrictions.

-edit, on second thought, i don't really want to be paying > $150 bucks for the game and the storage medium.

The biggest advantages of using ROM chips were their speed and ease of access. You could just address any data in the ROM space, without caching or transferring anything to RAM, essentially expanding the avaliable memory. Today you are forced to keep the memory hierarchy because the different memory types have different speeds/latencies, so using cartridges would make little sense in any modern system.

The Nintendo Switch uses cartridges.

No, they use solid state disks.

If you want to get technical, it's flash ROM chips; more akin to an SD card than SSD (though the technology between the two isn't far apart these days). But for all intents and purposes Nintendo's Game Cards are cartridges. They're designed in the spririt of cartridges and thusly are often referred to as cartridges.

But they're not cartridges, regardless of how people refer to them. To be a cartridge, as traditionally applied to video games, the ROM must be directly accessible from CPU space (whether completely, or through banking).

They might be designed in the spirit of cartridges, but they load files into RAM from a filesystem, and never access them directly from the storage media. Thus they're fancy SD cards that really, really want to be carts, but aren't.

Cartridges died with the GBA. Unless you count the myriad unlicensed, bootleg, or knockoff consoles that exist with multigame carts.

Edit (30 minutes later): The inherent nature of cartridges also allows direct access to peripheral chips (coprocessors, etc) found in the cartridge in CPU space as well.

You're confusing typical implementation as a technical definition. There's no actual rule which states a "cartridge" has to follow that definition (and in fact some 8bit micro computers with support for cartridges didn't follow your specification).

Given modern systems have a fat OS rather than a thin layer of firmware like the consoles of old, it would but highly illogical to build a cartridge system to the identical specifications of the 70s to mid 90's consoles. But that doesn't diminish the literal definition of the term "cartridge" just because you happen to nitpick the technical implementation.

If we're going to quibble about the definition of cartridge, I'd submit a far more interesting dimension is the ability of a cartridge to extend the console in meaningful ways, in the way that a SNES can not, on its own, run Star Fox.

That new definition covers off the majority of 8 bit micros (to the best of my knowledge) but I believe the CPC 464 Plus (read: not the regular CPC 464 but a later gaming model) couldn't be extended by it's cartridges; and frankly why would you need to as it had its own expansion port in addition to the cartridge slot.

I'd also like to add that I wasn't quibbling over the definition of "cartridge". I understand the term is quite broad but I am happy with that recognised definition even if it isn't a technical description. I know us engineers have a need to describe technology but not everything needs to be jargon.

I was just trying to inject an interesting angle to the discussion, not trying to be precise about what they are. It was an interesting characteristic they had for a while there. Personally I'm satisfied with "if it looks like a cartridge, it is", in which case absolutely yes the Switch uses cartridges.

Even thier "turds" weren't because of a lack of customer focus. Sometimes bad decisions can be made for seemingly right reasons.

> N64

The biggest problem with the N64 vs other consoles of its generation was the lack of a CD-ROM. But carts were specifically picked because Nintendo, at the time, thought they were better for consumers (eg less time spent on loading screens).

> VirtualBoy

This was originally planned as a virtual reality handheld device but as the project progressed different safety concerns were raised (eg what might happen to kids wearing the device in the car during a car crash). This is what lead to the device being crippled to the extent it was.

The Wii U was a failure, yes, but that didn't stop Nintendo from releasing excellent first-party games for it. Besides, Nintendo was able to (relatively) quickly come up with a much cooler and more practical console.

The Wii U was a good console that failed for a lot of reasons that didn't have much to do with the console itself. It had some of the best games Nintendo ever released.

I don't know what kind of response to feedback you expect -- once the console was out, there wasn't really much to do other than try to support it, and once that failed the only reasonable option was to try to quickly develop a successor. That's what they did.

> It had some of the best games Nintendo ever released.

Not really, because most people did not feel they were enough to warranty a purchase of the hardware.

> I don't know what kind of response to feedback you expect

At the first E3 where they unveiled the WiiU to the public something about a year before release the reception was mixed. It should have been a red flag that something was wrong. Nintendo did not listen.

While I do agree the WiiU was a kind of failure, I think not listening too much or being too reactive has served Nintendo so well that I hope they keep doing what they do.

Plus, if not for what they tried with the WiiU, we might never have had the Switch, which feels like an iteration on the same concept (but a much more successful one).

I genuinely believe the Switch is what Nintendo wanted the Wii U to be, but couldn’t pull off at the time.

eFusing to revert their "upgrades" is "pleasantly surprising" their users?

Oh please. Most of us just want to play games and not being able to do unofficial things makes exactly 0 difference.

Won't somebody please think of the disgruntled edge case user who just wants an excuse to be bitter?

Yeah, Nintendo has a few issues with being unwilling to do what's best for business/customers in favour of something 'different' even when the new idea isn't any good and the simple one would work significantly better.

See also how they treated F-Zero, Star Fox, Paper Mario, Donkey Kong in the GameCube era, Chibi Robo, etc. All things which had a perfectly fine formula that would have made for fantastic games if Nintendo did what people expected, yet which ended up commercially failing or being abandoned due to an obsession with the 'new'.

It's nice to try and surprise people, but you have to also ask yourself "Is this new idea any good, or is it being different for the sake of being different?"

One of the really impressive things about Nintendo is their corporate culture has encouraged passing on of institutional knowledge to younger minds within the company. Shigeru Miyamoto is coming up on retirement age, and some of us have been wondering how Mario and Zelda would fare without him. Well, we needn't wonder: Miyamoto was not very actively involved in the development of Mario Odyssey or Breath of the Wild, and those games turned out great.

And, as the article says, in Japan! There has been some fair criticism of the Japanese games market lacking in innovation compared to the West. Their indie scene is pitiful, AAA games stuck in 90s mechanics with fairly boring use of modern 3D hardware and a complete avoidance of online gaming trends. But, except for the online thing (although Splatoon might be among the strongest Japanese contenders), Nintendo manages to be maybe the most innovative AAA game developer in the world (especially when you consider their integration of hardware innovation in input devices). It’s quite remarkable. It’s an example of a very different culture being able to arrive at success in entirely different ways. It’s refreshing.

Non-mobile link: https://www.theguardian.com/games/2018/apr/25/nintendo-inter...

I highly recommend Mark Brown's video "Nintendo: Putting Play First, https://youtu.be/2u6HTG8LuXQ (and his other essays on Nintendo)

There are millions of people making videos about games, but Mark Brown is the only YouTube person I've found who always has something interesting to say about game design. The Zelda series was particularly good.

There is a kind of game design which works for me, and keeps me coming back. I don't think you can bottle it, any more than you can sell pixar to disney without keeping the brains inside the can. If you just sell the name, you don't get whats marked on the bottle.

Amici di / scuola di "Nintendo", but moved forward from the renaissance? Seriously, maybe you have to study at the feet of the master and accept his/her teachings and method, to make one just the same (but different) ?

I don’t think the author understands console cycles. These are decade long cycles.

Nintendo released Wii, one of the best selling consoles of all time, in 2006.

Then they released the 3DS, another of the best selling consoles of all time, in 2010.

Then they released the the Switch, the fastest selling console ever for them, in 2017.

This is not a company who is “on the ropes” and then off again. This is a company that is consistently at the absolute top of the charts year after year.

You can say the WiiU was a failure, but that risk helped them nail the switch. The only sense in which they were “on the ropes” is that they take risks which don’t work every single time. But that’s an absurd expectation. Of course bets don’t pay off every time.

The author is anthropomorphizing the design process. As if failed experiments are some sort of existential moment for the company. But these are just the natural ups and downs of an ambitious design team.

they source game/creative ideas from developers?

I'm sure it's not impossible to achieve success from that source, but more likely not.

I find it a little weird the exalted position that Nintento seems to occupy in most peoples' minds. Maybe it's that I've always been a PC gamer first, and that's skewed my whole view forever, but Nintendo's offerings have always felt a little... meh. I don't have any use for actiony platformers, and the cutesy art style doesn't do much for me. Nor do I care about gimmicky controllers. Since the end of the SNES generation, their catalog of third-party games has lagged behind the other options. It's all pretty underwhelming.

I expect this to be an unpopular oppinion, but it needs to be said.

>it needs to be said

What exactly do you feel needs to be said ?

You not liking what Nintendo does, while fair, does not sound like a very interesting opinion to me.

I have a compulsion to poke at sacred cows and point out when the emperor has no clothes. It's really hard to rein in.

Edit: It's also quite entertaining. There's certain fan groups that have elevated liking a product into quasi-religious stature. Pointing out the absurdity of that tends to bring out the sticks and pitchforks.

Now you presume you know the "truth", not that is a personal opinion of yours. That you are the only one in the crowd with the wisdom to see things as they are. That's why you are downvoted, not because your opinion is unpopular.

If you presented your opinion as just a subjective opinion, not the revealing of truth to illuminate the ignorant, your opinion would be treated fairly I'm sure.

BTW, I believe that there are a lot of people who are not impressed at all by Nintendo products. You are not that special.

Yeah but there is some degree of arrogance when you don't preceed such statements with "[...when I think] it's a sacred cow or the emperor has no clothes...".

How nice that a subjective opinion not agreeing with the zeitgeist is grey.

Fwiw I agree with the parent, the SNES was the last Nintendo console that I liked, the PSX for a brief time and then Doom and especially multiplayer Quake finally pushed me to the PC.

It's nice to have opinions, and as an almost exclusively PC gamer I have to disagree. Nintendo is the only console gaming company doing anything interesting, and I think part of that is because they don't chase third party support, the latest greatest graphics, or any of that hype nonsense. They make a games machine, they make games for that games machine, and they do it at the price range they target without much regard to what their competitors are doing.

Sometimes that bites them, other times they open an entirely new market of gamers their competitors didn't even consider. And at the end of the day, the reason Nintendo enjoys this 'exalted' position is because they are really, really good at making games that people of all ages want to play and not getting caught up in the other crap that doesn't matter.

From my perspective, it always felt like Nintendo had the right focus. They don't really play the specs game in the console wars. They will never wow you with their polygon count. I've always felt like you get more of a focus on just-plain-fun game mechanics with Nintendo, and for me, that makes the most fun games. Obviously, every game on the planet wants fun game mechanics, but, say, a typical AAA game uses an Operation Desert Storm shock-and-awe strategy. I don't want shock and awe when playing games, just fun.

Different people like different things, though.

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