Xponent on 15 April 2008
| jalsonmi said: Yokoi didn't just do hardware--even separate from Metroid. He mentored Miyamoto in the early days--back when Miyamoto was a graphic designer who had never worked on a video game and was enlisted to create a new arcade game for the American market. It was Yokoi who showed him the video game ropes, and they together developed Miyamoto's idea of a guy climbing a construction site and jumping over barrels to save his girl from a big ape. And Yokoi also is the father of Nintendo's operating philosophy-lateral thinking of whithered technology. That is, using not the most cutting edge technology that isn't quite understood yet and can't really be optimized, but rather using well established technology in new ways and optimizing it on top of that. So it's him and the way Nintendo has followed that philosophy that we can thank for a black and white Gameboy with incredibly long life, a less powerful DS (compared to PSP) that takes advantage of a touch screen and, of course, a non-HD Wii available for $250 that uses motion controls. By the same token, he's also the one we can "thank" for a Nintendo 64 that used cartridges, not optical discs, and a Gamcube that used tiny propriatary optical discs and not DVDs. So most of Nintendo's failures (and, of course, many of their biggest hardware successes), can be laid at is feet, not Miyamoto's (and that's not even taking to account the Virtual Boy). And while people may not like Miyamoto's general kid-friendly-ness, there's very little he's ever done that hasn't turned out well if not better. However diminished Nintendo's success was the previous two generations, a huge chunk of what was successful was because of Miyamoto. |
Yeah, I agree. To suggest that Miyamoto was responsible for Nintendo's failures as Dodece did, is flawed. I think he simply equates Miyamoto with Nintendo entirely, which as you've pointed out, is certainly not the case.
Likewise, it would be wrong to lay the blame directly at Gunpei Yokoi. Although his withered technology philosophy persists, he certainly wasn't responsible for the Gamecube. And Nintendo haven't always followed his design philosophy given that the SNES, the N64 and the Gamecube were all very powerful with respect to hardware. Furthermore, although the Virtual Boy was a disaster, Nintendo rushed to release it well before Yokoi was ready. Nintendo is the sum of all its parts.
