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GameCube (Games) Entertainment Games

Silicon Knights, Nintendo Cease Exclusivity Deal 70

Posted by simoniker from the n-getting-smaller? dept.
Divine Shadow writes "IGN Cube is reporting that Silicon Knights (developer of Eternal Darkness and Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes) is no longer an exclusive second-party developer for Nintendo. This is really surprising given that interviews with Nintendo and Denis Dyack (SK's leader) always seemed to suggest a bond and shared philosophy between the companies. Have to admit too, that this makes me less excited about Ninty's E3 lineup." Elsewhere in the article, Denis Dyack claims: "It's possible that we may do another game with Nintendo, actually. It just means that we've decided to break our exclusivity with Nintendo."
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Silicon Knights, Nintendo Cease Exclusivity Deal More

Silicon Knights, Nintendo Cease Exclusivity Deal

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  • No Mature Zelda (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @07:43PM (#8854879)
    Well there goes any hope of Silicon Knights to produce that "mature" Zelda people were hoping for.

    Dennis made a comment about how he'd like to make a mature zelda similar to how he said he wanted to make a Metal Gear game prior to the annoucement of MGS:TTS
    • This doesn't necessarily mean that they won't make that game, though it seems less likely since exclusive developers probably get more perks like the chance to make that sort of game. Even in the write up it says that they will still be working together. Still, I have a feeling that game was just Dennis' pipe dream anyway, Nintendo seems to like to keep their first party games... well, first party. I'd love to see the game, but I wasn't holding my breath for it.

      hed.

      • Re:No Mature Zelda (Score:5, Insightful)

        by edwdig ( 47888 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @09:03PM (#8855599)
        Nintendo seems to like to keep their first party games... well, first party.

        I wouldn't necessarily say that. Star Fox Adventures was developed by Rare, and wasn't even originally a Star Fox game. Nintendo saw it and thought Star Fox would fit, so they had Rare use the license. Rare also has done most Donkey Kong games since the mid 90's. Namco recently did Donkey Konga.

        Sega did the most recent F-Zero game.

        Capcom made 2 new Zelda games for GameBoy Color, and did the remake of A Link to the Past for GBA.

        I think the split (and the reason Silicon Knights never had a chance to do a Zelda game) was due to the philosophy differences between Silicon Knights. Nintendo makes gameplay the top priority, and molds the rest around it. Silicon Knights makes the story the top priority, and seems to leave the gameplay practically as an afterthought. Silicon Knights making a Zelda game would've resulted in a realistic (but not that impressive) looking game full of blood and dark colors, but completely missing any interesting gameplay.
        • If you think that Eternal Darkness was completely devoid of gameplay, as you seem to insinuate about the work of Silicon Knights, than I would really really REALLY love to play a game that you thought had decent gameplay, because that game was fantastic as far as gameplay went (well, I'll admit the final battle was kind of weak, but that aside).
          • I'd be inclined to disagree, ED had good gameplay, but its best features were the story and insanity effects (although some would count those under gameplay, I suppose). If it weren't for those, it wouldn't be any more then an average game, whereas Mario games and suchlike would still get good scores without what little plot they have.
          • I would say that Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem was pretty much devoid of gameplay. Don't get me wrong, that game is in my top three favorite games (at least) but it was all about the story and atmosphere. Try to imagine playing that game with a completely different story and a bright and cheerful atmosphere. It wouldn't be that much of a game. The play mechanics are OK but not anything special. They are just good enough that they do not distract you from the awesomeness of the rest of the game.
    • Thank God for that. I'm no Silicon Knights hater, Eternal Darkness and Twin Snakes are well made games. But I want them to stay far, far away from my precious Nintendo games. This announcement makes me happy that they are now less likely to murder a beloved franchise, but kind of sad because they are talented and I wouldn't want GameCube owners to miss out on their future projects.

      My main gripe with them is their dedication to make "mature" games. Who cares about how serious your game is, just make it
    • And you just reminded me of the Link vs Ganondorf fight they showcased back at the GameCube's unveiling.

      I want that...

      I like the new Zelda look, I think it fits fairly well, but I would love a Zelda that looked like that.

  • exclusivity == bad (Score:2, Insightful)

    by ghettoreb ( 711310 )
    the exclusive partnerships of console makers and game developers provide little benefit to the consumer, yet take away choice, and give monopolistic-like power to the console-maker (if you want the game, you have to go through him). It's no different than software that works only on one OS, or a web site that is only viewable on one browser or a song that is only playable in one media player.

    I see this as a victory for the consumer and gamers worldwide!

    • Re:exclusivity == bad (Score:4, Insightful)

      by MMaestro ( 585010 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @08:32PM (#8855350)
      the exclusive partnerships of console makers and game developers provide little benefit to the consumer, yet take away choice, and give monopolistic-like power to the console-maker (if you want the game, you have to go through him).

      Sony and Xbox do the same thing. GTA3/VC took years to come out on the PC and all it got was better graphics (not saying much), mouse look (not saying much), and the ability to play your own mp3s in the game (nice but wheres the multiplayer?). It took 2 years for Halo to be ported to the PC after the Xbox and it wasn't even done well. *cough*bugs*cough*

      Its a little different from software on the PC. Most of the time software is made for only one OS (or similar) for the sake of saving money/time. When you release an independent game with no major publisher backing you with a very smalled fixed budget, you're not gonna spend an extra 9 months working on making it Linux compatible for the 15 Linux users who are remotely intestered in the game.

    • Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by XellDx ( 737289 )
      I'm sorry, there's so many ways I dissagree with this that to begin I have to go back.

      Yes, Exclusivity does hurt the hell out of the Industry. No one wants a return the 1988 when Ma-Nintendo controlled 90% of all things released in the United states. That was a bad thing.

      However, no one wants to buy a game and have another version appear on another console marketted as better. As much as I hate it, everytime I'm in an EB or a Software ECT I hear the counter monkey berating people for buying a specific
  • Seems a bit alarmist...I think they just want to grow as developers. I don't think they'll just abandon Nintendo either, afterall that's their area of expertise at the moment.
  • This is bad news from Nintendo's point-of-view. Over and over again they have shown a unique stubborness, and unwillingness to compromize with others. Nintendo picked Silicon Knights up from the dust and made them into gold. Now, they leave Nintendo to get a possibility to develop games for other platforms. This can only be bad for Nintendo. Not only do they lose much-needed "mature" games, but also make sure that more quality games are being brought to the other systems. Suddenly Nintendo's upcoming E3-

    • Re:This is a symptom (Score:4, Informative)

      by edwdig ( 47888 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @09:18PM (#8855720)
      Nintendo completely bought out Retro Studios before Metroid Prime came out, so Retro isn't going anywhere.

      Rare had become a money sink. They've released very little in the past few years, all of which has been significantly lower quality than their older stuff. The owners wanted to cash out, and asked Nintendo for a very large sum of money. There's a limit to how much money is worth sinking into a company, and Nintendo decided they'd be better off selling the company than buying it out. So they let Rare sell themselves to the highest bidder, and sold their own stock in the same deal.

      Who knows what went on with Silicon Knights. Give it time and maybe we'll hear more. But they really weren't a good match together. Nintendo focuses on gameplay above all else, whereas Silicon Knights focuses on story above all else.
    • Too Human? EDII? HA! I hope you're talking about E3 2007. SK wasn't going to show anything this year.

    • 'much-needed "mature" games' is an oxymoron. The gaming industry doesn't need mature games, nor does Nintendo. What the gaming industry needs is fun games that sell for things other than boobs and blood. While a fun, mature game isn't a bad thing, an E-rated game (or whatever it is in America) which is just as fun is better.
    • SK and Rare were both different stories. I'm pretty sure Nintendo & SK just had a little agreement that SK would make exclusive games - whereas, with Rare (and Retro, maybe?) Nintendo owned > 50% of the shares.

  • It's a shame... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by CuBeFReNZy ( 771060 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @08:22PM (#8855265) Journal
    Just so you all know, Silicon Knights was not a 2nd party to Nintendo, they simply had a comtract to develop a few games exclusively. Now the contract has ended and Nintendo is just letting SK have some freedom. This news really isn't that bad. Dennis Dyack has always expressed how much he loves working with Nintendo, I'm sure that they will continue to make games for them in the future. But of course the online gaming world is going to turn this into some kind of "Nintendo aer teh d00med!!!!!11"

  • 3rd Party (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DrWho520 ( 655973 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @08:26PM (#8855298) Journal
    First/Second party support has never been a problem for Nintendo. Third party has always been an issue, due to software houses not appreciating the "draconian" nature employed by Nintendo to prevent shoddy games from making it onto their system. (If more people took this stance, we might avoid travesties such as Enter the Matrix.)

    I would hope this may signal an effort from Nintendo to garner better relationships with third party companies.
    • Hey, dumbass, Nintendo approved the Gamecube Version of Enter the Matrix.

      • Re:3rd Party (Score:4, Insightful)

        by shadowcabbit ( 466253 ) <cx.thefurryone@net> on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @09:48PM (#8855952) Journal
        Nintendo would have had to have suffered massive brain trauma in 80% of its executives to NOT approve a big-ticket title like Enter the Matrix, shitty game or not. I'm all for quality in games, mind you, but with the hype that EtM received pre-release no company would have wanted to be in the position of "everybody else has this really great game but us", the fact that it eventually did suck notwithstanding. For more examples of how NOT to do multi-platform, see Sega and EA Sports, Capcom/Virgin Interactive and Aladdin (SNES/Genesis), and pretty much the entirety of games released for the Saturn and Playstation, but not the N64.

    • Re:3rd Party (Score:3, Interesting)

      by ctr2sprt ( 574731 )

      Third party has always been an issue, due to software houses not appreciating the "draconian" nature employed by Nintendo to prevent shoddy games from making it onto their system. (If more people took this stance, we might avoid travesties such as Enter the Matrix.)

      The concern is that at a certain point it ceases to be quality controls and becomes censorship. And how many good games have Nintendo rejected because they were afraid their "family-friendly" image was going to be tarnished? Now if that's

  • I'm not sure why, but I'm one of the few people who thinks that Silicon Knights isn't the amazing development house everyone considers them to be (I've only played Eternal Darkness and MGS:Twin Snakes though, keep that in mind. I don't know what else they've done).

    Eternal Darkness, I simply hated. The graphics looked ugly, the gameplay felt sloppy, and the story didn't get me involved at all. If I wanted to play a good, polished horror game I'd pick either of the new/updated Resident Evil games on the Ga
    • They haven't done anything else. They spent 4 years on Eternal Darkness and got right to work on redoing MGS into Twin Snakes.
      • ...and * Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain * Cyber Empires * Dark Legions * Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem * Fantasy Empires * Fantasy Fest! * Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes ED and MGS:tTS were just their biggest titles. They have also been working on the (rapidly approaching Duke Nuk'em Whenever status) Too Human.
        • ...and * Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain * Cyber Empires * Dark Legions * Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem * Fantasy Empires * Fantasy Fest! * Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes ED and MGS:tTS were just their biggest titles. They have also been working on the (rapidly approaching Duke Nuk'em Whenever status) Too Human.

          Blood Omen is really the only other game that doesn't belong in a museum, though.

          SK has been working on Too Human since before Blood Omen was finished (IE somewhere around 1996). I was hoping N
    • Eternal Darkness, I simply hated.

      You've apparently never worshipped the crawling chaos.

      Nyarlathotep r0x3rZ. ;-)
    • Seriously, Eternal Darkness is a great game.
    • I think the thing with Eternal Darkness and Resident Evil is that most people either like one or the other, and they usually hate the one that they don't like. I can't think of anyone I know who likes both, but I know people who like ED and people who like RE.

      I personally really, really can't stand the controls for RE, and even though the characters have a completely ridiculous number of polygons in their models, they felt really stiff to me in their animation and how they moved around. Of course, there
      • I think the thing with Eternal Darkness and Resident Evil is that most people either like one or the other, and they usually hate the one that they don't like.

        I think you are right.

        I loved ED. About six months ago I saw a sealed copy of the Gamecube RE on eBay for $20, so I thought I'd take a chance. It's awful. The graphics are obviously excellent, but the controls are completely stupid (Capcom, you got it right with Devil May Cry. Why won't you make the RE team use a control system that makes sense for
        • Actually, the Resident Evil games are produced ONLY in english audio versions. The lousy voice acting is a bit of an homage to the Italian zombie movies that were the inspiration for the games. As for the other games, Capcom USA just does a shitty job of hiring Voice directors for their projects.
      • I got about quarter of an hour into RE on the gamecube and just got so pissed off with the camera angles making it impossible to see what's going on. The camera view seemed to be constantly either obscured by something or switching back and forth between two viewpoints because the action was taking place on a boundary between two areas. That, combined with an awful combat and poor animation put me off completely.
        I only paid 8GBP for it though (clearance sale), so I never bothered trying to get any further.
      • Yeah, I guess so... love them or hate them, no in betweens. I have no problems with the RE controls, but as evidenced by your post, some people do. Thing is, I can't think of another control scheme that would work with the camera angles the game uses (use a totally analog control scheme, and you'd have to adjust your movement every time the camera angle changed).

        Some people seem to hate the camera angles too, but I think they're completely necessary for the environment the game creates. It's far more ci
  • I think there's enough people around here that love Nintendo that I don't think we'll see the "Down With N!" fanboy blurts. I think it is interesting, though, that both Microsoft and Nintendo seem to be trimming their waistlines. As good as Silicon Knights are, I seem to remember seeing that their MGS remix didn't sell terribly well, and Eternal Darkness (which is fantastic) didn't perform either. So, as far as numbers go, it makes sense to cut the extra money involved in exclusivity.

    What I think this t

  • Won't hurt now, but later (Score:4, Insightful)

    by TheLoneDanger ( 611268 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @10:03PM (#8856093)
    This won't hurt Nintendo this generation at all. Simply put, I highly doubt that Silicon Knights has much experience with either the PS2 or the Xbox, since they've been working exclusively with Nintendo for the last few years.

    If SK makes any more games for this generation of consoles, it will be for Game Cube or be technically less polished ports of Eternal Darkness.

    Long term though, I think this will hurt Nintendo. Silicon Knights made the type of games that Nintendo itself won't. More complicated, darker games with more attention paid to presentation (story and flash). This will just further reinforce peoples' view that Nintendo systems are for kids. I love playing Nintendo's games, but it does get boring not having something darker to play, and makes it that much harder to convince friends to play on a Nintendo console.

    Silicon Knights had talent and were a good complement to Nintendo's usual style. Unless Nintendo manages something better with 3rd parties than it has (simply allowing Japanese companies to make Nintendo-published games isn't enough), things are only going to get worse. A good thing would be to seriously pursue Square-Enix to make games for their next system, even if only by telling them that they can't afford to allow Sony or Microsoft to go unopposed by Nintendo. After all, if Nintendo stops making consoles, then there'll be less competition amongst the hardware companies and they'll have to start competing with Nintendo games on PS4 or Xbox3. Not good for any 3rd party company.

  • Saddened yes, but.... (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Any company leaving your second party ring is bad for the image, but let's not forget that E3 is right around the corner, and there's gona be a spot open left by SK... ...Specifcly, i'm refering to that rumor a while ago about Zoonami becoming second party. No offense to Dennis, but if the choice came up, i'd much rather have Martin Hollis (Leader of Zoonami, Of Perfect Dark and Goldeneye fame)stick around to make exclusive games. His work really helped keep N64 going, and if I remember the dates right, he'
  • That's the reason for the split up. Nintendo and SK both value quality over quantity: Both want to spend as much time to make a game as good as it can be. They share similar ideas about the industry. However, their styles are completely different: SK likes to make plot-rich, dark games, while Nintendo favors simplicity that appeals to everyone. Both companies obviously recognized this, as the agreement to end the deal and feelings between the two companies are quite mutual. This could be
    • Actually, on second thought, this whole thing about SK going multiplatform is a hoax. To be more specific, it's an "insanity effect," a real-life publicity stunt set up to hint towards the unveiling of Eternal Darkness 2 at E3. Wanna know why?

      1) Dennis Dyack has stated the relationship between Nintendo and SK is very, very strong. Numerous times, he has talked about how similar Nintendo and SK are: How they have the same philosophies, how they get along so much, how much they enjoy working together. Whe
  • I'm worried that Microsoft will jump in and buy them, just like Rare. Their strategy of throwing money at the industry until they finally succeed may actually work.
  • http://cube.ign.com/articles/506/506508p1.html?fro mint=1 The trickle is slow, but significant.

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