The Legend of Skyward Sword or how one game took down a whole company

[gumby_trucker]

RolStoppable said:

Aonuma would never make a shooter, because he despises reflex based gameplay. He admitted to hating the original The Legend of Zelda, so of course he is the wrong man to be in charge of the series. Zelda should be made by someone who actually likes Zelda. If Aonuma had his way, then Zelda would probably be completely dead by now as it would have become more of a Professor Layton game than fighting monsters, because that's the type of gameplay he personally enjoys. Part of getting Zelda back on track for a painless development process would be removing Aonuma from the series, because he really has no business making it.

Star Fox wasn't Cuthbert's series (I assume you mean Star Fox, because I can't think of anything else right now). Argonaut had skilled programmers, but without help from Nintendo when it comes to game design they would have been nothing. Vortex was a trainwreck. Cuthbert didn't work on the most popular Star Fox game (64, completely developed inhouse by Nintendo), but he got another chance with Command which used a lot of the ideas from the canceled Star Fox 2. I don't know how much of an influence Nintendo had on this game (likely as little as on Namco's Assault), but it certainly didn't turn out well. The problem in the case of Star Fox is that Nintendo gave the series into the hands of other developers instead of taking care of it themselves which is a completely different issue than what this topic here is about. That is first and foremost the management of Nintendo's inhouse development teams.

EDIT: Actually, it is a related issue. If Nintendo managed their inhouse staff better, then they wouldn't need to outsource some of their series.

Aonuma wanted to make an online sequel to Link's Crossbow Training but was told to concentrate on Zelda.

http://www.1up.com/news/aonuma-wanted-link-crossbow-training

"In an interview with gamesTM magazine (via NowGamer), Aonuma revealed his real interest in making the next Zelda title was to create a sequel to the Wii Zapper pack-in game.

"To tell you the truth, I actually wanted to create Link's Crossbow Training 2," Aonuma said. "I thought that we should do something more and better in the field of the first person shooter, based on our experience of the first game. For example, I was thinking that maybe we could intensify the multiplayer mode. The original game was really just a solo game but I thought that we could add a true multiplayer mode with multiple users playing together, from remote areas, over the Wi-Fi Connection."

So why aren't we anticipating a new online multiplayer Zelda crossbow FPS right now? ecause Nintendo higher-ups (mercifully?) shot Aonuma's idea down. "The fact of the matter is that a lot of people inside Nintendo insisted that I should work on a new Legend Of Zelda title rather than working on more Crossbow Training," Aonuma said."

If you also read up on the development of the original Crossbow Training, it's known that the team actually wanted to make a much more epic and exciting game, being Nintendo's first entry into the FPS genre, but was shot down by Miyamoto who told them to concentrate on a "non-epic side story to TP" and also to have 3 minute long levels with no bosses at the end... I'm not saying which would have been better, just that there always seems to be a large amount of tension when it comes to franchises that are based on Miyamoto's imagination. Just like with SF, the guy needs to let go once in a while.

Regarding SF64, I thought it was said to be pretty much a remake of SF2 which was developed along with Cuthbert...

edit: after checking on that last one it turns out that only about 30% of SF64 is said to come from SF2 so maybe it doesn't matter. Still I should mention that it was Miyamoto's decision to cancel the game at the point where it was practically complete, in anticipation of the N64 (which eventually launched a whole 18 months after the game was complete...) and not because of any issues with the game's quality.

What matters here is that there seems to be a constant state of disagreement between what developers want to work on and what the management at Nintendo thinks they should work on. Just like in any other company, sometimes this tension turns out for the better, sometimes it turns out for the worse...