Nintendo officially removes Wii U page from website

[librarian13579]

Cerebralbore101 said:

librarian13579 said:

I feel like Nintendo 1st-party in the GameCube era had more originality put into it. It's hard to quantify, but it's not just the nostalgia talking----lately I've been playing a lot of GameCube games on my PC (via Dolphin and a USB GameCube controller). Developers really tried to go all-out instead of making cheap, shitty cash-ins (compare the brilliance of Mario Power Tennis to the horrendous Mario Tennis: Ultra Smash). I think it's because in the GameCube era developers weren't stymied by Miyamoto who jammed his vision of a budget-obsessed, sterilized Nintendo down everyone's throat.

 Miyamoto wanted budget games? I'd like to know more please. 

Think about it.

Shigeru Miyamoto became a senior member / Representative Director on the Board of Directors at Nintendo on May 31st, 2002. He was promoted from a bottom-rung junior director / department head to one of the key budget strategists of the company.

At Nintendo, video game projects are greenlit with a specific budget, often at least two or three years before they end up coming out.

When Miyamoto became a Representative Director, he became one of the people responsible for greenlighting the budgets for video game projects for projects that would come out in 2005 onward (like New Super Mario Bros.)

If the budget was too high, now Miyamoto had the chance to say "Sorry, that's too much money, go back to the drawing board." Before that he could make suggestions, but he didn't have the final say.

 

 

Of course, even though he became a senior member in 2002, there was still Satoru Iwata and Atsushi Asada (the real head of Nintendo until 2005) that he had to make decisions with.

Once Atsushi Asada retired, it was just Miyamoto and Satoru Iwata who called the shots on game budgets. And that's when you start to notice more budget games. I don't know exactly if it was Miyamoto's idea or Iwata's idea originally, but their focus did start to increasingly include projects like New Super Mario Bros. Wii, which produced extremely cheaply with recycled assets.

It's also around that time that Miyamoto had the bright idea to remove all character customization in Mario games to "capture the essence of Mario." I can't help but see a connection between the two...after all, it's far cheaper to have all Toads look the same than pay a team of character designers.