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Shigeru Miyamoto. One of the best game developers in the world, is getting left behind as the video-game industry grows-up.
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Tuesday, February 18, 2003
Nintendo's new Zelda: "Someone stop us!"
The Link between Shigeru Miyamoto and arrested development.
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Nintendo is one of those companies that seems to openly seek out failure these days. When it introduced the N64 in 1996 as a cartridge based system, it alienated just about the entire development community.
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One that preferred keeping game designs unrestricted from the memory limitations posed by ram-chips, through CDrom disc-based games. Nintendo claimed that it was a decision based on the need to keep the games it developed free from burdensome load-times which might hobble it's stable of characters from having to await a level or dungeon's appearance.
That was the PR story anyway. The widely accepted conclusion from the developers who were willing to talk, was that Nintendo wasn't about to provide pirates and unlicensed developers a free-hand by packaging it's software on easy-to crack and copy discs instead of cartridges.
These concerns pretty much hobbled the N64 from ever getting even a small fraction of the library or audience the Playstation achieved - or even a small fraction of the variety of themes now taken for granted - because of the cost and restrictive programming required by developers to bring their content to Nintendo's platform. In fact, over the 5 year lifespan of the system, only 3 games were widely regarded as must-haves or critical successes for the N64, and two of those came from the same person. A game designer by the name of Shigeru Miyamoto.
That's probably because the restrictions that drove other N64 developers out of their minds (and eventually away from Nintendo) didn't apply to him because of the company he keeps. That company being Nintendo. Mr. Miyamoto has been called everything from the Spielberg of video games, to the game industry's savior. It's hard to argue against any of this - not only because he single-handedly defined several game-generes (3d platformers, and exploratory world-play among others) - but because he was able to create them in-spite of the hardware and software limitations placed on him by his bosses.
Those restrictions became - almost - irrelevant to someone who had the most complete and in-depth development environment, the resources to coax the most out of the hardware's design, and a free-hand in ordering changes to specs for controllers, memory, peripherals and most other aspects of the actual game-system itself (except for the cartridge format). I say - almost - because both titles took an immense amount of manpower, money and nearly 2 years each to bring to market. Obviously - making games for the N64 posed some unique problems.
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 Next page | Still - the titles that emerged, held the high-water mark...
1, 2, 3, 4
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