Bungie Vs. Miyamoto - Fight!

Last week Gamehead's Geoff Keighley interviewed Shigeru Miyamoto, and the well-known designer tossed off a mildly controversial comment. Keighley asked him if he felt as though he was losing touch with the American audience as a result of the popularity of games like Halo. GameDaily reports on Miyamoto's response: "I could make Halo. It's not that I couldn't design that game. It's just that I choose not to. One thing about my game design is that I never try to look for what people want and then try to make that game design. I always try to create new experiences that are fun to play." Bungie took exception to that, and Frank Connor retorted in his interview with Joystiq: "Yeah, well. I just want to go on the record and say that Bungie is hard at work on a side-scrolling platform game featuring some plumbers -- I'm not going to say what their ethnicity is, it's none of anyone's business -- but we took that as a gauntlet, a sort of glove slap, and we're going to respond in 2D scrolling style. That's all I'm saying." We discussed that article, along with several other pieces of Halo 3 coverage, this past Saturday.

Lost in transaltion

[HappySqurriel]

This story is "old" (as in a couple of days) and from what I have seen the general consensus is that what Miyamoto said was poorly translated and taken out of context.

Essentially, when Miyamoto said he could "make Halo" what he meant was "He could make a game like Halo" ...

I could be wrong but I think Miyamoto was saying he makes the games he does because they're the kinds of games he wants to make; he is not influenced by the popularity of a genre or series to attempt to make games like them.

Re:The thing is that it's true

[Anonymous Coward]

Halo isn't really even new. It's very much a lot like the game Marathon, only with better graphics and physics. In fact if you look at the design of the Master Chief, he bears a striking resemblance to the cy borg you play in Marathon. They even left the words SPNKR on the side of the rocket launcher, another Marathon weapon.

Re:The thing is that it's true

[Aldur42]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_Zero/ [wikipedia.org] Halo zero

Re:Is Halo really that great?

[FerociousFerret]

And if you like the Halo story, you might also like the Marathon story as well. Although I believe Bungie said that Halo was in a different universe than Marathon, it was originally believed that Halo was a prequel to Marathon that happened during a hole in the timeline between "Pathways into Darkness" and "Marathon". [bungie.org]

Marathon's Story [bungie.org]
Marathon Trilogy [wikipedia.org]
Marathon / Halo link [bungie.org]

Of course, there are those that don't think the games are tied together at all [bungie.org]

Re:The thing is that it's true

[revlayle]

Wrong: Miyamoto was a design consultant and sort of a long distance project director on behalf of Nintendo to monitor the design and development of Metroid Prime (at least the first game). In fact is, I think Miyamoto was the one that told retro to make the game first-person instead of third-person which caused some amount of the development, up to that time, to be scrapped.

A couple other Nintendo people helped with the game design also, not just Miyamoto, including the original designer, Yoshio Sakamoto.

Re:Argument That Will Never End

[aichpvee]

A) We're talking modern Bungie. That being "microsoft presents Bungie." I would have thought anyone who had played Marathon or Myth and then Halo would have realized that the Bungie of old is long gone.

B) I was referring to the Bob Ross analogy. You would know this if you...

C) Learn to read.

Who said you can't like Marathon and respect Bungie's history but hate what they've become? Read just about any of my comments on the topic of Bungie and you'll see a healthy respect for their previous work, even if it wasn't always the most revolutionary it was still pretty good and introduced new ideas where it could.

For what it's worth I don't particularly like half-life either, and I hate valve as a company. Their coding quality is shit (there's a reason their games get hacked so much), their company ethic (getting owned for running beta outlook is ridiculous, as is putting out a game every 7 years and living off the poorly compensated work of volunteers), and Gabe Newell is a fucking idiot.

That being said, and boring story aside, half-life provided an excellent platform for modding, the Worldcraft editor valve bought was also excellent in the pre-Unreal2 world, the vanilla deathmatch was well balanced one-on-one (as in I'm 2-0 life time at it, so it must be awesome!), and TFC owned.

And I realize that you can read and just jumped to a conclusion.

Re:The thing is that it's true

[FGizzard]

True.

See this article in The Escapist for more info.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/39/11 [escapistmagazine.com]

Not Popular?

[Gotung]

Gamestop alone has taken something like 400,000 pre-orders for Halo 3. That just one chain of stores. And thats just pre-order. And the game won't even be out for a few months.

Re:Halo's popularity

[twistedsymphony]

Halo 1 for the Xbox ranks 25th for lifetime sales in the US since with 4.91million units sold
Halo 2 for the Xbox ranks 16th with 6.11million units sold
Metroid Prime ranks 147th with 1.92 units sold
http://vgchartz.com/worldtotals.php?name=&console= &publisher=&sort=America [vgchartz.com]

Keep in mind this is all platforms for all time, competing against greats like Mario Bros on the NES, Tetris on the Gameboy, The Sims on the PC, and Grand Theft Auto on the PS2. Ranking 16 and 25th for all time is no small feat.

Re:The thing is that it's true

[Petrushka]

A few parts of Psychonauts work that way.

Re:Bungie officially sucks.

[JonathanBoyd]

Ah, the irony of your sig, in the light of your comment. It's hardly Bungie who are being oversensitive; it's guys like you who can't take a joke.

Re:They all have good points

[Dwedit]

Game Boy (4.194MHz "GB-Z80") actually had more processing power than the Game Gear (3.58MHz Z80). This is true even after factoring in that Game Boy instruction timings are rounded up to the nearest 4 cycles.