Nintendo/Iwata's Bias Against The West

[Mr Khan]

Soundwave said:

Retro was set up by Howard Lincoln and the HQ was built to house 5 different dev teams or so.

There were supposed to work on several games simultaneously, generally to be aimed at 'older gamers'. An NFL sim, Car Combat, Raven Blade were among the initial games in development.

What they are today is nothing like what they were intended to be. They were basically supposed to be another Rare-style studio that made multiple games for Western gamers.

Unfortunately they had some management issues with Jeff Spanenberg early on. Then Lincoln/Arakawa retire in 2000, and Retro is fairly dramatically restructued around this time to focus soley on Metroid Prime. 

Hindsight is 20/20 of course, but who knows if any of those games would have been any good? An NFL game that would have fought (at the time) with Madden and 2K both. Car Combat that could have just been seen as a poor man's Twisted Metal or worse. Raven Blade's the only one with any real promise, and who knows how that could have gone?

What we got instead was the Best Game of All Time (and one that did some good things for the GameCube, if only at 3 million units)