| dharh said: Nintendo has no bias against the west. They just do not understand it. Read what I am saying. They don't understand it. Not even a sliver. They never have. You think they understood the west in the 90s? You are wrong. They lucked out. Every success they have ever had in the west has been luck or just universaly acceptable/good products. Nothing else. |
They understood the West because Howard Lincoln and Minoru Arakawa were in charge of NOA and Yamauchi basically relegated at some decision making to them.
That's why Rareware was allowed to make games for Nintendo in the first place. Nintendo also did respond to gaming trends back then, for example the arcade fighter back then was like what FPS are to the market today, and Nintendo greenlit Killer Instinct specifically for the US market. Nintendo Sports was for the Western markets.
You have things like Starcraft 64, at one point Nintendo was actually working with the developers that would go on to create Grand Theft Auto 3/4/5 (DMA Design, now known as Rockstar North). They were one of Nintendo's "Dream Team" members of largely Western based studios tasked to bring games to the Nintendo 64.
GoldenEye, Perfect Dark, Conker's Bad Fur Day, Star Wars games (several of them), Starcraft 64, Killer Instinct, Kobe Bryant NBA Courtside, Ken Griffey Jr. MLB, Donkey Kong Country, the original Star Fox (SNES), the founding of Retro Studios were all largely due to NOA, these are not "lucky breaks", but natural pay offs to an American division that actually used to have some autonomy in doing things.
There's also a few games that Nintendo was working on through NOA that never got released like FX Fighter (a 3D fighter for the SNES) and Riqa, a Tomb Raider type game for the N64.
If NOA's hands were not tied by the horrible cartridge-only console decision with the N64, I think the N64 would've easily sold 50+ million worldwide.
