The Rise of Nintendo: A Story in 8 Bits (2014) | Hacker News Reader

The Rise of Nintendo: A Story in 8 Bits (2014)

grantland.com

98 pointsblkjam26 comments

From the interviews and histories that I've read/watched, the EAD[0] dev team was doing some of the highest level UI design in the world in the 80s and 90s.

They started each game from the interactive experience and then fleshed out the details from there. Think running and jumping in Mario - they spent months getting the gravity and speed right, the button presses, all before the first thoughts to art, level design or story.

It was very iterative. They'd start with a concept and then tweak and tweak and tweak until it was as fun as they could get it.

Another good example is the development story of Super Mario Kart[1], which was supposed to be the sequel to F-Zero[2], but they invented/discovered new gameplay elements that fit better with the Mario brand and they took the game in that direction.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Entertainment_Analysi... [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_Kart [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-Zero_(video_game)

It was also technical limitations that led to it being Mario Kart and not F-Zero. To do two players simultaneously they had to greatly reduce the track size and cut the framerate in half. This led to something that really didn't feel like F-zero so they eventually shifted it to go-karts and then from there they got the idea to use Mario characters and add items.

Wrestling with gaming has a fantastic video on the making of Super Mario Kart.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MspqDuq5OZY

Fun book. I’ve said this before on here but it purports to lionize the Sega of America folks but can’t help but present them as non-technical marketers without much depth to them. Meanwhile the Nintendo crew, ostensibly the bad guys in the story’s narrative, seem passionate, principled and serious about shipping great games people love.

I loved Console Wars, and while Nintendo is the competition in the book, I think the real antagonist of the narrative is Sega of Japan. It’s really unfortunate that the two groups couldn’t act as a unified company. (Though I grant that this telling of the story may carry its own bias)

This is an odd situation that I've encountered multiple times working in an NA division of a Japanese company in those days.

Discussed at the time:

The Rise of Nintendo: A Story in 8 Bits - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7747082 - May 2014 (20 comments)

The mini interview about the launch of the Nintendo Entertainment System from Gail Tilden the manager of NIntendo Power magazine (mentioned in the article) after the video game crash was pretty interesting. https://youtu.be/Sn5v09L_uDg

Apparently the initial version came with a robot? Which seems weird to me…

Yep. ROB was the gimmick that allowed Nintendo to say to retailers "It's not a video game!" and convince them to stock Nintendo's products. You really can't overestimate the difficulty Nintendo faced in getting ANYONE AT ALL to look at their system; the crash had been so devastating to the market that all the major retailers had completely sworn off ever touching consoles again.

In the video, they said they called the "Nintendo Entertainment System" to avoid calling it video game console.

a little digging (ROB is wikipedia famous). R.O.B. (Robotic Operating Buddy) ha!

"In January 1986, an independent research firm commissioned by Nintendo delivered a survey of 200 NES owners, showing that the most popular given reason for buying an NES was because children wanted the robot"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.O.B.

> 1. The Nintendo Seal of Quality: Ron Judy had the novel idea of mandating that all games pass a stringent series of tests to be deemed Nintendo-worthy, ensuring high-caliber product and making software developers beholden to Nintendo’s approval.

See this is what apple should be doing in an open app store.

It's worth noting that the quality of games currently released on the Nintendo Switch is currently pretty abysmal[1], with as many Unity asset flips and low-effort 'games' as on Steam.

Perhaps it's not as bad as the situation on mobile, but a quick look through the recently released list on the eShop shows how bad things have gotten.

[1] https://kotaku.com/fans-are-pissed-about-the-switch-eshop-s-...

There's a lot of rose-colored glasses about how Nintendo has been auditing games in recent history.

There was a lot of crapware on the DS and Wii as well. My Stop Smoking Coach was a real DS title.

Yeah the scale of shovelware and even broken games is really bad.

It's what Apple is already doing. The Nintendo situation was: either your game gets the Nintendo Seal of Quality, or it doesn't get published at all. The Seal of Quality was much more an exclusive gateway of access to the platform and a censorship device (to prevent repeats of the Custer's Revenge situation) than it was an assurance of quality: if you watched AVGN videos you'd know there were plenty of shitty NES games. Nintendo also capped the number of published games per third party and insisted on manufacturing all the carts. Some underground publishers found ways around the NES lockout, but to do so would be to invite lawsuits from Nintendo (and would be a felony under today's DMCA).

This is absolutely true. If anyone remembers Tengen back in the day putting stuff out without the Nintendo seal of approval; Nintendo completely freaked out about it despite the fact that Tengen’s stuff was much higher quality than many “approved” Nintendo games.

Tengen started out as a licensee. They released three games as licensees (Pac-Man, RBI Baseball, and Gauntlet). They were also simultaneously cracking 10NES. Worried about damage to consoles, they went to the Copyright Office and falsely represented themselves as potentially entering into litigation with Nintendo, and obtained the 10NES program (which is honestly probably where they screwed up). They started releasing the famous black unlicensed carts, and proceeded to get sued.

>Nintendo also capped the number of published games per third party

They also allowed said third parties to get around this via shell companies, if they were popular enough. See: Konami and Ultra Games

It is a kids game to publish something on Apple's store versus on Nintendo.

> 1. The Nintendo Seal of Quality...

But they allowed LJN to publish:

https://crappygames.miraheze.org/wiki/LJN

Yeah, and then Apple’s review throughput drops through the floor, leaving only “big names” at the top of the priority list and indie developers can pound sand.

Don't only "big names" make it though to pop on the app store anyway.

They essentially have the best of both worlds. Anyone can publish their niche app, to a niche audience.

But only Apple decides what hundreds of millions of people will be exposed to.

I remember when I used to play Pokemon Greenleaf with my friends; the Nintendo and pokemon hype was something back in the day.

(2014)

> The following is an excerpt from Blake J. Harris’s new book, "Console Wars".

From Amazon: Publication date May 13, 2014

Or more directly refer to the article's own publication date: "ON MAY 14, 2014"

Grantland, the site as a whole, has been dead since 2015.

Am I the only person slightly disappointed that when I opened the article I didn't just see a single letter staring back at me?

Here's your article:

Reply on news.ycombinator.com