Shigeru Miyamoto:Father of the gaming industry??

[jalsonmi]

Xponent said:

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.

I agree with you, certainly--nothing can be put at the feet of any one person in any company, much less as multi-faceted a video game company as Nintendo. And it wasn't really fair on my part to put Gamecube propriatary optical disks as something that falls under the withered technology doctrine. But I do think that is what was behind N64's cartridges (seting aside Nintedo's creating their biggest competitor with the whole SNES-CD debacle.*)

It's interesting the way you can track most of Nintendo's quirks as a company back to specific lessons learned and possibly never really gotten over. The distrust of the video game industry after the crash led to the Seal of Quality, which lead to an almost authoritarian control over 3rd party titles. Hence N64 era seeing a hell of a lot of 3rd parties jumping ship once another truly viable option came up. I think it was defining philosophy of Yamauchi's because of the circumstances of the crash that he never realy got over. Itawa has seen the errors of that line of thinking, and is attempting to right it accordingly. Similarly, the prolifiration of terrible porn games for Atari by Mystique was looked upon as another cause of the crash, hence the family friendly mature that became doctrine (though that's looking a little too narrow possibly--they might jut be an uptight company--but again this is something that has slowly changed ith time, more rapidly under Itawa. I doubt Yamouchi would have ever let Manhunt II come out for the Wii). I don't say these things by way of saying they're a bad company, but hey, as a hardore gamer I want to play, say, Resident Evil 4 as much a the next guy, and I'm glad things are changed in recent years to allow such a thing to happen on Nintendo consoles.

*For those of you that don't know (which may be some, may be none, I have no idea), an amazing story from video game land: Nintendo wanted to create a CD-ROM add-on for the SNES. To this end they enlisted two companies-Phillips and Sony. However, after much development time with both companies seperately, they announced, without telling Sony beforehand, that Phillips was creating their peripheral. The SNES-CD died in devlopment, with all there is to show for it thoe awful Phillips CD-i Zelda games as part of the deal. Meanwhile Sony, feeing betrayed, had done massive development towards a Nintendo Cd-ROM based console and were no left holding the bag. so they decided fuck it, we'll finish it and release ourselves, and that's how the Playstation was born.