reverie on 27 April 2007
Nice piece about Kutaragi's career.
Yokoi, the creator of products like Game And Watch and the Game Boy, believed in a philosophy called "Lateral Thinking of Withered Technology" - essentially, taking old, well-understood and cheap components ("withered technology") and finding new, interesting ways to create entertainment with it. Nothing Nintendo made used cutting-edge technology; it just used relatively old technology in radical new ways. It's a philosophy which persists in Nintendo to this day - but to Kutaragi, whose entire career had been a life-long obsession with the cutting edge, no approach could have been less attractive.
Hardcore gaming is a bubble economy blown up by Microsoft's $7 $6 billion losses.
