Rather than make a bunch of threads starting loads of arguments, I figure we should have just one thread on Mr. Malstrom. Also, the title isn't misspelled, for those of you wondering.
To start, I'll post three articles he made today. You don't have to agree with them, but let's at least try to be civil, and understand that some people just agree with the guy, and not because he said these things, but because they see where he is coming from.
Also, I don't know how to embed Youtube videos, so I'll just note where they are, and you have to click the links to see them.
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Email: Games are still like rock (but rock is not what it is used to be)
Dear Sean,
I´m yet another one of those expanded audience gamers. I´ve been thinking about something you mentioned a couple of times and that I can relate to: that older, arcade-style games were like rock and roll.
I remember watching an interview to Ozzy Osbourne some years ago where he said that rock and roll in the eighties was like a neverending party, and that the new “alternative” rock was all about being angry or depressed or whatever.
Perhaps you agree that there is a parallel to videogames here: arcade style games in the eighties were all about brilliant colors and catchy melodies, they were straight up, simple, cheesy and innocent; a neverending party, just like rock and roll was. Remember Kiss, Van Halen, Def Leppard, Bon Jovi, Iron Maiden…?
Modern hardcore games are pretty much like recent rock and roll acts: dark, angsty, depressed, overly complicated with many studio effects and “fusions” of styles,… And most of them come with a “Parental Advisory” label, which is the equivalent to “Rated M for Mature” in the music biz. Hardcore games are like Linkin Park, Korn, Marilyn Manson, Tool…
The funny part is that the recent success of Rock themed games has given new popularity to old rock and roll songs, and introduced them to a new young audience. But it seems that hardcore gamers like both old and new rock and roll songs in their Guitar Heroes. Why can´t they tolerate games that are a simple, cheesy, never ending party?
You bring up an interesting point. Rock music has certainly changed. I remember the more bright songs like this:
YOUTUBE VIDEO
The aural experience is paramount to the consumer experience in gaming. In the Atari Era, the games you know as classics were defined even back then by their sounds. Space Invaders had the heart beating in the background with the pew pew.
YOUTUBE VIDEO
Games were a very trippy experience. This is something that isn’t being considered now. Feel how Centipede sounds or even Berzerk.
YOUTUBE VIDEO
YOUTUBE VIDEO
Games began to have jingles. Consider Donkey Kong or Pac-Man. The Waka Waka sound and when you get the power pellet are integral to the game.
YOUTUBE VIDEO
When the NES came out, it really shined with the music. Computer games at the time never had much in the way of music. Super Mario Brothers did many things right, but perhaps the biggest thing it did was popularize background music. Background music was considered a ‘gimmick’ at one time. Games like Gradius, Zelda, and Mega Man are unthinkable without their music.
YOUTUBE VIDEO
Sonic the Hedgehog was not a better game than Super Mario World. However, everyone thought so because Sonic definitely had the better soundtrack.
YOUTUBE VIDEO
It seemed as if the game’s imagination and intensity increased as the music capabilities increased. But music maxed out as soon as games went to CDs and perhaps a little before then. Then it seemed as if much of gaming just kinda went flat.
Here is an interesting look at Final Fantasy 6’s ending boss theme though the piece does strike me as a little overanalyzing (but who am I to say?). Have you noticed how the current “Industry Event” games, like Gears of War and all, have the appearance of the World of Ruin or Kefka’s Tower? Lots of brown and darkness. Modern gaming is little more than gaming in apocalyptic environments. Very depressing.
Fitting for the “Game Industry”. Depressive games for an industry in decline!
YOUTUBE VIDEO
The Expanded Audience, including women, are the Old School gamers
Despite its name of “New Generation”, DS and Wii are not doing anything that is really new. It was common for women to play video games as well as the entire family over twenty five years ago. Many of the Expanded Audience are these old schoolers. But the ones who had never been a gamer would be gamers if they lived back twenty five years ago.
I remember Tetris selling to grandmothers. God bless the Tetris grannies! Today, they are all dead. At least they got some gaming bliss before they departed from the Earth. It is difficult to figure out how many old people played games back then because, today, they are all pushing up daisies.
Here is a video from that time period. And yes, your eyes are not deceiving you. It is a woman host saying she is addicted to Pac-Man. And the owner of the arcade is a woman as well! And they talk about video games at the hair salon!
YOUTUBE VIDEO
The Mario Triumvirate
I always approach things with a viewpoint of skepticism. Prior to the Iwata Asks interviews, you would have thought Shigeru Miyamoto personally made and crafted every Nintendo game. For all we knew, Miyamoto could be sleeping in his office the entire time only to be trotted out for the next interview somewhere.
I do not believe that pushing the notion of “game god” as some solitary creative artistic genius is good for gaming. It distances developers from their true masters, the customers, and it brings in tons of kids into the “Game Industry” who all believe they are the next Shigeru Miyamoto. So I always try to pour cold water whenever a ‘Game God’ scenario comes up.
Much of the history of Nintendo’s earliest games didn’t make sense. The history was all presented as if games from Super Mario Brothers to Zelda were only made, entirely, by Miyamoto as if he, personally, programmed them and put in the art. Then we got all this strange talk about Miyamoto’s childhood, of exploring a cave in his youth, and on and on. Part of this we can blame on David Sheff’s book on Nintendo where he really focuses on the personalities involved and tends to sensationalize them.
The Mario 5 interview of Iwata Asks was likely the best Iwata Asks interview ever. It tells much about how the NES classics were made. And these are details no one has gotten before, not even Iwata and he is the president of the company!
There are so many things we learn in this interview. We learn, for example, that Zelda was originally going to be designed for the arcades and that the dungeons were designed first. Only afterward was the overworld put in so the player could go to dungeon to dungeon. This totally blows up the idea that Zelda was originally designed to be a game based on ‘exploration’ and further cements the idea that Zelda was very much intertwined with arcade gameplay.
We have also learned why the brilliant Raccoon Mario disappeared in Super Mario World, and why it has never returned (despite fans wanting it). Miyamoto wanted to put Yoshi in Super Mario Brothers 3 but the NES hardware couldn’t really handle it. So Tezuka came up with a number of power-ups for Mario to use in Mario 3 instead such as the Raccoon Mario to Frog Mario. We learn that Tezuka had to really fight to keep Raccoon Mario in as well as flying. Since Raccoon Mario was seen as just something that was to make up for lack of Yoshi, it was dropped for the unimaginative cape in Super Mario World.
From the viewpoint of where I am sitting, it seems like Miyamoto has a beef that Raccoon Mario is the most popular Mario power-up ever made since he didn’t make it. I even remember the cape in Smash Brothers, but no Raccoon Mario. And the fantastic power-ups of Mario 3, from Raccoon Mario, Tanooki Mario, Hammer Brothers Mario, and Frog Mario have been MIA ever since Mario 3 despite their immense popularity.
Sadly, there was no mention on how the Koopa Kids came to be. I am very curious about who came up for the idea of making them.
What we learn is that there is not just one single mind behind the classic Mario games. Rather, there was three, a triumvirate if you will consisting of:
Tezuka
Nakago
Miyamoto
Nakago sums up how the triumvirate works by saying this:
If I had to put my finger on it, I’d say that the image I have is that Miyamoto-san starts off by digging a hole. Tezuka-san then finds some way to fill this hole. Then, right at the end, I make sure it’s smooth and solid by pushing a roller over the soil.
This is good for the “young budding game designers” to know because many people believe ‘game genius’ is with ideas. It isn’t. Implementing them and polishing them are also forms of genius as well. These are forms of genius that should be examined more in gaming instead of focusing entirely on the ‘game creator’. Especially with the older hardware, it is genius how they were able to implement complex things in such simple hardware. To this day, I still marvel at how the maker of Paradroid and Uridium was able to accomplish such games on the primitive Commodore 64.
When playing NSMB for the DS, I could tell that something was very off with the game. It didn’t feel like a true successor to the classic Mario series. According to the interview, only two members of the Mario triumvirate were truly involved in NSMB DS. The one missing apparently was Miyamoto.
With Super Mario Brothers 5, from the consumer side I instantly knew this felt like a successor to the classic Mario games (which is why it is called Mario 5 on this site). Now I know why I felt this way: all three members of the old Mario Triumvirate were working together on it again.
Iwata
Tezuka
Iwata
Nakago
Iwata
Nakago
My consumer experience instincts were right on with calling NSMB Wii as “Super Mario Brothers 5″. It IS Super Mario Brothers 5! In the snippet above, it confirms it.
So to you pundits out there, it is not NSMB 2. NSMB Wii is not the successor to Mario 64, Sunshine, or Galaxy.
Note how there is no mention at all of Yoshi’s Island. Without the Mario Triumvirate, Yoshi’s Island cannot fall under the category in the classic Mario game series. It is a good game, but it is simply something else. Yoshi’s Island also never remotely matched the consumer excitement that the classic Mario series games had… or even Mario 5 (as the game keeps selling out in various places as I speak).
I wish I was a fly on the wall at the moment when Nintendo executives realized that not making the platform side scrolling Mario games anymore, and going entirely 3d Mario, that they were leaving out a huge amount of former customers. And perhaps this realization also included why the N64 and Gamecube sales were such steep declines from previous generations. What did they say at this realization? “Oh f%^$!!!!”? When this generation began, they referred to Mario Galaxy as THE Mario game. I suspect the realization had to have been with NSMB DS’s insane sales.
Super Mario Brothers 5 is selling very well and is even moving hardware. Does this mean we have to wait twenty more years for Super Mario Brothers 6? “Don’t be ridiculous, Malstrom,” a reader says. “With how big this game is selling and how it moves hardware, even in Japan, it would be insane for Nintendo to stop making them.” I thought the same thing too twenty years ago. Throughout the 16-bit generation, I was eagerly awaiting Super Mario Brothers 5 and expected it to be as awesome as Super Mario Brothers 3 (Super Mario World was a launch game and was lacking in many places. It even lacked the multiplayer that Mario 3 had!). What I got instead was side scrolling games with monkeys from a second party (which wasn’t even remotely the same as Super Mario Brothers 5) and Yoshi’s Island which was not what we wanted at all at the time (Yoshi’s Island was controversial for the same reason Wind Waker was. The saccharine art style was very much rejected by the market). Then we got the Virtual Boy (oh joy). And then we finally got Mario 64. At that point, I gave up all hopes of Super Mario Brothers 5 and had no reason to buy Nintendo consoles anymore.
Now look at what Iwata is saying here:
Iwata
-
It looks like I may not have to wait another twenty years for Super Mario Brothers 6.
A flashy-first game is awesome when it comes out. A great-first game is awesome forever.
Plus, just for the hell of it: Kelly Brook at the 2008 BAFTAs
