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Comment by larrik | Hacker News Reader

> During the recruiting process, Fils-Aimé asked to speak directly with Nintendo of Japan's Global president at the time, Satoru Iwata, before accepting any job. "It is not something they had planned to do," he told Present Value. "I learned later on, it caused quite a bit of issues within Nintendo. 'Who is this person asking to meet with our global president?'" This phone interview with Iwata-san was eventually scheduled and originally meant to last 30 minutes. It exceeded 90, Fils-Aimé said.

Nintendo Japan thought it was weird that a potential President of Nintendo of America would want to speak to what sounds like would be his primary superior? Am I reading that right?

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"Demanding" anything from a superior is a bit of a no-no in Japan, even if it's something as simple as a phone call.

So communication is completely top to bottom?

>completely top to bottom

effectively, yes. This was a large part of why nintendo's online strategy was so poor for such a long time. The Switch is the first of their products where they specifically asked the younger employees to lay out what it should look like.

Common in many Asian countries, and kills ability to see shit at product level - definitely.

I'll cede that some of Nintendo's online strategy failed, hard, but...outside of a few things, I don't think they did that bad?

Friend codes were actually really neat; they managed to do interesting things in terms of casual online interaction (I still remember being blown away at video chatting with someone half-way across my country on DSi hardware (16MB RAM and ARM processors that weren't even capable of running Linux[1]), in a (first-ish party; Game Freak) video game where it wasn't even a sideshow it was such a small feature), they managed to do pretty painless interaction between your device and a PC in 2010, Flipnote Studio was a really innovative/impressive piece of social media in 2008 (more like Vine than Twitter, really, and first-party), etc.

Like sure, most of their uses of online prior to the Wii U or so were novelty uses, but they were still really well-executed, and at least early-on had a whole lot of genuinely interesting uses of it.

[1] I think there's a port of a very very old version of μClinux that kind of works on the system, so this is only partially true.

When did they introduce friend codes? Couldn't you say "Nintendo's online strategy" (should have) started with the original Wii in 2006 and was basically non-existant for years? :)

Only being half-snarky here, I only own a SNES and a GameBoy Advanced.

The Wii was too early, I think (anecdotally, I remember my family couldn't figure out how to get it connected to the internet), given the market it was aiming for (families).

They introduced friend codes with either the original DS or the DS Lite, I believe.

the Wii came after X360, not too early.

The Xbox 360 was aimed at a niche of people (college-aged 'gamers'), and I qualified my statement saying that it was too early for the demographic the Wii was targeting.

DS and Wii games both used the same friend code system— they’re GameSpy profile IDs converted over to a friendly 12-digit format.

Which, coincidentally, is why Wii and DS online no longer work; Nintendo never built a replacement service after GameSpy shut down in 2014.

The GameCube had at least one game that was online only: Phantasy Star Online III. And you're telling me a generation later was still too early? Heck, in Japan, both the N64 and the SNES had online capabilities through additional hardware.

SNES didn't have online capabilities, it had satellite capabilities with specialized and expensive hardware (assuming you're referring to SatellaView).

Anything that requires specialized hardware to access the internet isn't ready for general consumption.

PSOepIII (episode III, not PSO III. It was actually PSO II) was an MMORPG; MMORPGs are aimed at a far different demographic than the group that the Wii was targeted at. Also, weren't PSO ep. I and ep. II released on the GameCube? Pretty sure they were.

"There were multiple companies in the 60s that had mainframes that didn't even work very well; are you telling me that your average family wouldn't be ready for computing back then?"

Focusing on internet connectivity on the Wii would have harmed the Wii, yes. The Wii had Wii Shop and a few titles that could interact online. Making it the core feature in many of them would harm the console, because not only would many people have difficulty setting it up, there were also significant portions of even the United States that were almost entirely decrepit of even moderately decent internet connections.

SNES had the XBAND modem too.

Not sure if it used the Internet, however.

I forgot about the XBAND!

If I remember right, which I might not, XBAND used the phone system but didn't use the internet.

Don’t forget online banking on the SNES:

https://youtu.be/Dkxxd3uH1ZY

I think XBAND had some kind of email service that did let you email people on the Internet.

Yeah, but am I misremembering that you could play online with the original Wii? or was that only the Wii U?

Pretty sure it had a browser and a store.

Wii had online play, and friendcodes. You could play Mario Kart Wii online, and share your time trial ghosts with your friends. (if you exchanged friend codes)

>I'll cede that some of Nintendo's online strategy failed, hard, but...outside of a few things, I don't think they did that bad?

Netplay on Nintendo consoles has been terrible. I admit that they did some interesting social things with the handheld consoles, Miis, and leaving comments (Mario Maker, Mario 3D World), but playing anything against another player was almost always terrible.

Smash Brothers has been one of their biggest competitive titles across many generations. Yet on the Nintendo Switch, the 5th iteration of Smash is still unplayable unless you're on a wired connection. Even then, you can still feel the lag in Smash more so than any other fighting game. Street Fighter 5 is notorious in the FGC (Fighting Game Community) for having terrible netcode. Yet I can still have high quality matches on a wireless connection.

You can't share digital games or DLC across accounts bound to the same consoles in a sane manner. Even if you specify that the accounts belong to the same family, it doesn't matter. Nintendo somehow made buying digital assets on a Switch more restrictive and a bigger headache than physical copies.

Don't get me wrong, there's some definite novelty in some of Nintendo's online offerings, but they are definitely stuck in the past.

>the 5th iteration of Smash is still unplayable unless you're on a wired connection

For what it’s worth, I always play Smash Ultimate’s online on Wi-Fi (NAT type A) and practically never have problems with it. Though I guess the average player’s wireless connection might not be very good, and most players don’t use a wired connection as it requires an adapter.

They made some impressive technical achievements, but their overall platform and infrastructure was awful. For example, no unified friend system, different online services for different consoles, no SSO for games.

I think for casual play like Mario Kart, Pokemon, etc, it worked fine. It absolutely hamstrung more complicated efforts like Smash, Metroid, and third parties were forced to all heavily build out their own infra or not build the feature at all.

These were problems that plagued much more powerful systems (Wii, 3DS - until very late in the lifespan of the console, Wii U, and even the Switch)

Do you have any articles about how to reached down?

Was poor? It's currently a Joke. Coming from Halo and to Super Smash Bros I'm shocked at the complete lack of online support.

1. Trading phone numbers is easier than adding Friends on a switch

2. No voice chat service

3. No built in streaming

4. No game invite system

Don't be surprised. It was even worse.

I highly recommend checking out the book "Console Wars" by Blake Harris. It provides an insider's perspective of the Sega v. Nintendo battle during the 80s and 90s. Among other interesting elements explored are the strange and sometimes downright competitive dynamics between the Japanese and American arms of these companies. After reading this, I came away thinking that a lot of the reason for Sega's demise (as a console-maker, anyways) were the stuck-in-their-ways Sega of Japan executives.

https://www.amazon.com/Console-Wars-Nintendo-Defined-Generat...

It was a great book and very revealing about Japanese business culture in general.

> Nintendo Japan thought it was weird that a potential President of Nintendo of America would want to speak to what sounds like would be his primary superior?

In 2003, he was interviewing for the position of VP Sales & Marketing. He wouldn't become president of NoA until 2006.

Ah, that's a part I was curious about.

Nintendo of America is sort of ignored by Nintendo of Japan. It's more surprising to me that he was able to advocate for the Wii Sports bundle in America and Europe, and even there, he emphasizes that it wasn't actually his decision to make.

I worked for Nintendo of Europe and I don’t think it’s true that NOA is ignored by NCL (Japan). NOA has had a good amount of creative and strategic leeway and NCL listens to them since the 80s. Hell, even NOE who is clearly third in the pecking order is treated with quite a bit of respect.

Bundles are a clear example where territories have pretty good leeway to call their own shots. “Not his decision to make” means he needed to approve it with NCL but, well, isn’t it normal that the corporate HQ would want to have final approval on such matters?

> Nintendo of America is sort of ignored by Nintendo of Japan.

I suppose that's still less contentious than Sega of Japan vs. Sega of America.

> It's more surprising to me that he was able to advocate for the Wii Sports bundle in America and Europe

It's not like the decision was without precedent for Nintendo: the NES came with the Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt cartridge.

I watched this 'documentavideo' a few months ago. Goes into a bit of detail of the history of Nintendo of Europe and one guy who helped it spread. I'd assume relations between the various branches have pretty strong interplay.

https://youtu.be/SKgL8u4CPJ8

The term you're probably looking for is "video essay."

Prior to Reggie, NOA was just a distribution company. They handled orders and collected their middle-man fees. A vanishingly small percentage worked on actual games.

NOA started taking some cues from Microsoft, and started moving some technology competency into NOA. NCL (the japanese acronym for Nintendo of Japan), of course, saw this as a threat. Even 5 years ago, when I was last there, the entire office had a hidden resentment for the Japanese office. The US office had pulled off some amazing feats, and it resulted in most of the interesting technology projects being yanked back to Japan.

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