Inafune:‘If a Creator Hasn’t Played Mario, They’re Probably not a good Creator’

[Mr Khan]

fatslob-:O said:

Mr Khan said:

fatslob-:O said:
That's a pretty bad generalization.

I should say not. Whatever genre you work in, you probably owe something to Nintendo, pretty much unless you're in text RPGs. The historical impact of their works are foundational to game design as a whole, and if you think you can ignore the foundations, then you need a lesson in humility.

It's like anyone who aspires to be a great movie director, "Birth of a Nation" (white supremacist morals aside) is required viewing. If you haven't seen it, you can't understand where the medium's been and can make no credible claim towards contributing to the medium in a progressive way. So it is with video games and Mario, or Zelda. So much of what present games take for granted comes from these resources, and you cannot be groundbreaking without appreciating those who broke the ground that you stand upon, or more importantly, understanding why they were so successful.

Games are very different today compared to what nintendo created as ground breaking in the past. They may have had a big impact on game design but I'd go as far to say that third parties overall did more in the past recent years to make more revolutionary ideas than nintendo does now. Nintendo is not humble enough anymore to disrupt the idustry.

Focusing only on recent successes leads to a fad mentality, which is why things that are somehow revolutionary like "the cover mechanic" just get watered down and endlessly repeated. Now, i'm not trying to trash Epic Games here, as there was one thing Cliffy B knew, and that was game design. Bad designers, and believe me that these are the majority of today's game designers (and yesterday's, but that's just Sturgeon's law at work). Cliffy B made the cover mechanic because it worked for Gears of War, because he knows his history and gets what really makes games tick. Gamers, critics, and bad game designers alike just look at it and see "cover mechanic. Now required for 3rd person shooters."

This is because the fundamentals of good gameplay design do not evolve, just as the fundamentals of good movie design do not evolve. We get better tools, more bells and whistles and different ways to deliver the experience, but the core drive, that thrill, the thing that brings you back to a game again and again, is the same, which is why the first person to get it *right*, which in gaming comes down to the masters of the 80s and 90s, depending on the genre, really Nintendo, Squaresoft, EA, iD, and Capcom to a lesser degree, and their contributions shall always be the most significant, and should be the closest-studied.

Going back to movies, let's look at Star Wars. George Lucas' work on the original trilogy was better because he respected the fundamentals and was not consumed by his own ego. He was ripping off the fundamentals, left and right, from epic movie stories of his day, from Westerns and World War II movies and Kurosawa-type Samurai movies. What made the prequel trilogy as iffy (or bad, but we're not here to fight that) was that he was essentially trying to top himself, setting his new work against his old work rather than looking beyond that to the base elements that made the old work good.

Square Enix, i should say, is in the same predicament. They build new Final Fantasy games trying to top the last Final Fantasy, or one of the "great" FF's, like 6 through 10, which allows them to lose sight of the core ideals which are encapsulated in Final Fantasy 1.