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Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of Nintendo's most popular video games such as The Legend of Zelda, Donkey Kong and Super Mario Brothers, gives us the head's up on why gamers are still loyal to their Game Boys.
Game Boy is still cool!
I think maybe it’s because it’s accessible to everyone in terms of the price point. And pretty much anyone can buy the Game Boy Advance. And we’ve really tried to take the technological capabilities of Game Boy and improve upon them while keeping them within reach of the average consumer. So I think supporting it in that way has really helped boost its appeal.
And I think Nintendo is not so much a hardware company really as it is a software company and what we really focus on doing is making games. So I think that one of the other things that has contributed to the success of the Game Boy has been matching great software titles with the different platforms. I think they really helped to draw audiences in and convinced them to buy the hardware.
Challenges for Game Boy
Obviously in terms of what you can create, the Nintendo GameCube has much higher technological capabilities than the Game Boy Advance does. So you can create a lot more and do a lot more with the Nintendo GameCube. But the flipside to that coin is really that in order to create all of the things that you could possibly create with the Nintendo GameCube technology, it takes a lot more time and trouble.
So for the Game Boy Advance, creating games that are fun at the very core of game play rather than games that gain some of their interest and their appeal by the beautiful graphics or what’s surrounding the game, not so much the framework but what’s on the surface of the game, becomes a lot more difficult with Game Boy Advance. So really focusing on simple games that have a core element of fun and also making them very portable, games that can be taken anywhere and played anywhere and started and picked up at anytime.
Thoughts on Sega and Sammy
Obviously, the cost of creating games has gone up dramatically. And the gaming industry is seeing a lot of challenges in trying to finance games. So obviously it’s important for game companies to be able to find ways to support the cost involved in developing games. One thing that does lead me somewhat uneasy is that we’ve gotten to a point where with the new technology, you’re really able to do so much in a game and yet it takes so much time and so much energy. And so to create these extremely realistic graphics and make use of a lot of the sound within the game design takes up more and more time and more and more money, so that obviously is a concern for me.
Future of arcade games
It used to be that the arcade games had technological superiority over the home consoles. But it’s gotten to the point where the home consoles are able to create extremely technologically advanced games at a very low cost. So in that sense, the arcade industry has lost some of its advantages. But actually in Japan now, we’re seeing the creation of arcade-style games that can only be done in the arcades and couldn’t be done with home consoles.
One of those is a soccer game where you have different cards that you rearrange there at the arcade to affect the soccer game and play that game. And you’re also seeing particular areas of arcades where parents and children can play their games together in ways that they wouldn’t be able to with their home consoles. So I think that maybe not necessarily in the sense that the arcades are able to provide these technological advances over the consoles, but rather in ways that they’re able to provide creativity and different styles of game play that you can achieve with consoles, than I think there definitely could be a future with arcade gaming.
Nintendo's mission
Obviously Nintendo has grown and matured quite a bit along with its gaming audience. But one thing that we’ve always tried to do is try to create games that people who’ve never played games before can pick up and try out and immediately enjoy and have fun with.
So one thing that we want to try to do is not just try to create games that are stunningly technological or graphically brilliant or have this kind of superficial exterior to them, but really kind of look at games that have a very fun and unique gameplay at the core and trying to do unique things that we haven’t seen so far.
Taking the Game Boy Advance and connecting it to the Nintendo GameCube and creating new styles of gameplay that way. Or using the E-reader and connecting that to the Nintendo GameCube and scanning cards and seeing what that can do to the gameplay and how that affects it. And essentially trying to create new ways of playing that anyone from a young child to even a senior citizen can sit down and easily pick-up and enjoy is one of our big challenges. And we’re going to try to continue to do that and we hope everybody’s looking forward to it.
Icons Interview: Eiji Aonuma on Zelda
written by J. Park on Tuesday, August 10, 2004
Eiji Aonuma works on The Legend of Zelda video game series. He takes us step by step through the series.
Nintendo and Zelda
I took the basic introductory exam that they required of all new employees and was selected to enter the company. I studied art in college and applied to work at Nintendo. Originally I didn’t think I’d be designing games.
I was an artist at first, and back then we were working on NES games. I was actually an artist creating pixel characters. Seven years ago, we began work on the N64 game, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. And at that point was the first time I began working on Zelda in planning. And since then I’ve been working seven years on essentially Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask, and the most recent title, The Wind Waker.
Working with the mastermind
When I first started designing games, I didn’t really take the approach of “I want to do this.” I really kind of looked of what Mr. Miyamoto (creator of Nintendo's most popular video games series: The Legend of Zelda, Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros.) had done and thought that maybe if I can find ways to mimic what he had done than maybe I’d be able to make good games too. But the nice thing is that now that I’ve been designing games for a while, I’ve gotten to a point where I can actually sit down and talk with Mr. Miyamoto and bring my ideas to him and we’ll interact and he’ll say, “Hey what do you think about this?” And I’ll say, “Oh that’s a good idea!” And I can move forward in that direction. So it’s gotten to be a very mutually rewarding relationship.
Ocarina of Time
Our original thought for the The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was essentially to take Super NES game, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and turn that into a 3D game on the N64. And in doing so, we took one of the items from the Super NES game, and it wasn’t featured very much in A Link to the Past, but we decided to essentially take that and make that kind of the main item in Ocarina of Time and use it as kind of this musical instrument that plays an important role in the game. So we brought this idea and worked on it with Mr. Miyamoto.
Ocarina's success
When you’re actually developing a game, it’s really hard to see how it’s going to turn out and whether or not it’s going to be successful. But with Ocarina of Time, when we actually finished working on the game and saw what we had created, we were really surprised and we said, “Wow, we really may have done something great here.” It was just really this great response that we got from the game. And I think at that point, Mr. Miyamoto really thought that we may have had a big hit on our hands.
Majora’s Mask
Actually, right after we had completed The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and things had started to slow down for us, Mr. Miyamoto came to me and he said, “I want you to come up with a Zelda game that we could create within one year.” Ocarina of Time was essentially a three-year development cycle. And because of that, we unfortunately had to make a lot of fans of the Zelda series wait for the latest installment. So the idea was to try to bring them a new title sooner. And of course by using the Ocarina of Time engine, we were certainly able to decrease the development cycle. But also, if we were to try to create a game that was as vast and was very large in the scope of Ocarina of Time, we wouldn’t have been able to do that within one year. So it was kind of based on that idea, that we came up with our concept of having unlimited time-frame that you replay over and over again, and that essentially became the focus of Majora’s Mask.
Majora’s success
I was pretty pleased with the response. We received a lot of commendations for having created this game system that was unique and new and that made us really happy. And also, with me personally, I was really interested in looking at once we released Majora’s Mask to see how dedicated people were going to be and just how much of all the events that were occurring in the game they wanted to play through and experience. And there were some comments where people said there was too much to do in that limited amount of time. But overall, I thought it was very interesting to see just how people were so involved in what was going on in the world.
Ocarina vs. Majora’s Mask
With Ocarina of Time, the events in that game weren’t really fixed to a specific time-frame. But with Majora’s Mask, we actually had this limited time-frame that the player would play over and over again. And throughout that, the events that occurred were occurring at fixed points in time. So the player would essentially have to look at specific days and specific times and decide which of the multiple events that were occurring they wanted to become a part of. And they could kind of watch the events unfold in the same way, but depending on how they interacted with them the events might change. So really this idea of the player being more involved in the events and having to schedule their time on a daily basis became an important part of the game play.
Wind Waker
I’ve been working on the Zelda games for a long time now. And in doing so, I’ve been able to study the play control systems of the different Zelda games. And based on that study, we were had the idea that with the Wind Waker, we wanted to find the control style that’s best suited for the Zelda games and make it as easy to use as possible. So that was one of the ideas we had when we first began development of the Wind Waker. With Wind Waker and this goal of trying to create a very easy and simple to control game, we decided to go forward with the toon-shading that we’re using with in game. And the reason we did that is because as graphics get more and more realistic and more and more animations are required to maintain the realism of those graphics, it actually can become more difficult to control if things are not as realistic as the player feels they should be. And so instead, we decided to go with the toon-shading and this idea of deformation and more fluid movement to help make the play control easier as well.
From 64 DD game to cartridge game
The Ocarina of Time was actually never planned as a DD specific game. Midway through the development cycle of the N64 game, we had decided to come up with ideas for how to make Ocarina of Time compatible with the 64 DD. In doing so, we came up with a variety of ideas that we could add to the gameplay. And because the 64 DD was a re-writeable media, we essentially were looking at ways that we could save changes that the player made to the environment in the world of the Ocarina of Time onto the DD so that when a player went back, he could experience those changes again. We looked at other ways because it is a re-writeable media, once a player had cleared a dungeon, if they wanted to go back in there, we would be able to, say, leave markings so that the player wouldn’t lose his path going through the dungeon. And those sorts of add-ons to the game were considered, but ultimately we weren’t able to do it within the time-frame that we had for development, so those kind of features were removed from the game.
We had originally planned for the final version of Ocarina of Time to essentially have the Ocarina of Time Master Quest available, which would also interact with the DD. But ultimately we had to remove that from Ocarina of Time. And actually now with Wind Waker, you’ll get a free disc that has both the original Ocarina of Time, as well as, this never released Ocarina of Time Master Quest, that has the dungeons slightly rearranged and some changes like that to it.
Beyond international barriers
I don’t really think of Zelda as being a game, but really as being a kind of separate world where players are able to enter this world themselves. And they’re able to move around this main character named Link and they’re able to experience the things that he experiences in the game and meet the people that he meets, and gradually go on this adventure where through exploration and experience, the character and the player themselves actually kind of mature throughout the course of the events that unfold. And I think in that sense, there aren’t really a whole lot of other games that take that approach and I think to me, that’s the reason that Zelda appeals to so many people.