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Games Entertainment

Yamauchi Puts the Game Industry In Its Place 160

Posted by Hemos from the letting-people-know-how-he-thinks dept.
los furtive writes "John Ricciardi of Video Senki has a great interview with Hiroshi Yamauchi, president of Nintendo, his "absolute favorite" for the same reason Castro is his fav head of state: "They're both firm as a rock on their issues, and they're both just so goshdarn sincere, you know?""
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Yamauchi Puts the Game Industry In Its Place More

Yamauchi Puts the Game Industry In Its Place

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  • Yamauchi = Mountain House (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I honestly believe he does have an impact on the console game industry, HOWEVER, he was just in the right place at the right time WITH the right man...namely Shigeru Miyamoto. Miyamoto is the real genius of Nintendo and they owe everything that they are to him. Then again, it was genius of Yamauchi to hire Miyamoto in the first place and see the talent he had within. Or maybe luck? Who knows, it's happened and I'm happy for the games they've made.

  • Re:Bah. (Score:1)

    by pb ( 1020 )
    Yeah, and they owe it all to Pokemon.

    Don't get me wrong; I know they make money. I don't like Microsoft either, and they make even more money. But yes, I don't like their games. I'm not complaining that *they* don't have money; I'm complaining that *we* don't get quality. Also, Nintendo was *so* paranoid about this stuff that they released a cartridge system and further crippled their games and their development--and people still dumped the ROMs...

    And could you guys cut it out with the PSX2 statistics? It was stupid the first time. The PSX2 will sell a lot once there is a really popular game released for it, just like the N64 did when Zelda was released. Which, BTW, was *years* after the original release of the N64. Just wait for the next Square game... :)
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
  • And I'm glad you did post something; this is one of the best responses I've gotten so far. I should probably tell you now that I'm prone to understatement.

    For Understatement #1, yes, I think the SNES is awesome. Maybe not as awesome as the NES was, but still very cool.

    For Understatement #2, no, I couldn't justify buying a Console system for just a few games. Even for four or five. Maybe that's why the last one I owned (and still own; I got another one! :) is the original NES.

    Believe me, if Nintendo still had games like that on their system, I'd own an N64. As it is, I really don't feel like I'm missing that much. But that's just my opinion. :)

    And no, the fact that they make money does not mean that suddenly I like their games, or that their games are somehow better. I guess someone is buying them, namely Pokemon for the Gameboy; that still doesn't say much for the N64.

    Cheers.
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].

  • Re:Bah. (Score:1)

    by pb ( 1020 )
    Is there still a shortage?

    You can tell I don't own a console system anymore. :(

    Awesome handle, by the way!
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].

  • Re:Bah. (Score:1)

    by pb ( 1020 )
    I wasn't talking about sales, and neither are you; I'm talking about gameplay. I was expecting more, especially after the sheer amount of time Nintendo expected everyone to wait.

    And yes, gameplay is much more important than graphics. That's why it made no sense for Nintendo to piss Square off. Incidentally, there's no way Square could have made the Final Fantasy games as cool as they are without a CD-ROM drive, and they've done some really impressive stuff with the Playstation!
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].

  • Re:Bah. (Score:1)

    by pb ( 1020 )
    Well, you did identify the two games for the N64.

    However, have you played... oh, I don't know...

    Pole Position, Food Fight, or Crystal Castles on the Atari? (I had a 7800)

    I already listed the plethora of great NES games, including the original Zelda. I liked Contra and the Ninja Gaiden series too.

    I also listed a lot of good SNES games; Ogre Battle is great, as is Mario All-Stars.

    Dreamcast has some fun games, too. For racing game fans MSR is very cool. Samba De Amigo! is just whacky. :)

    The Playstation had some cool games. I liked Alundra, for example. The Final Fantasy games are a must, like the anthology of 5&6. And I still need to play Tactics. And for fans of fighting games, they have a lot of those.

    So, on any of the other systems that I've played around with, I can name at least two or three great games, and sometimes many more. The PlayStation 2 is very new, and I haven't gotten to play with it yet, but there also aren't that many games released for it yet. However, compared to the Game Cube, it looks pretty good at the moment. :)
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].

  • Re:Bah. (Score:1)

    by pb ( 1020 )
    No, I'm complaining that there haven't been any good remakes of Mario, and the planned remake of Metroid doesn't look anything like Metroid, either.

    What I heard about the two Zelda games were that if you played the original Zelda game, you didn't miss much, but that they were too short. Zelda on the SNES, however, didn't have either of those problems. I only played the first Zelda for N64 once, mind you, so this is just what I've heard.

    Also, it took Nintendo *way* too long to even release that.

    Nintendo *has* made a ton of money on the Gameboy, but I think they've stopped producing the quality games that they used to. Granted, I haven't messed with N64 for a bit, but when it came out, they had only crappy games on the system for *years*, with the possible exception of Mario 64.

    The next decent game was Zelda 64, which many people bought the entire system for, because they hadn't seen a *reason* to buy it earlier. That alone should tell you something.

    After that, I have no idea what they've done. Mario Kart 64 looked amusing, but that's about it. The other games I haven't seen, because I already gave up on the N64 as an aging console platform with a lot of crappy games that I'm not about to pay for...

    But the Mega Man games do rule, although the later ones get pretty hard. It's sad that they have to be backported now, though.
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
  • or does Hiroshi Yamauchi look like that old guy from Gremlins with glasses on.
  • Sure, the PSX2 would sell a lot *if they had the hardware to sell*. The intent of the public is meaningless if there's nothing to buy.
  • $200k would barely cover rent and salaries for a gameboy dev team. Doesn't go very far at all these days. Good size PS2 team can cost over a $1,000,000 per annum in salaries alone.

    Check the team size [sierrastudios.com]. Guess the salaries, do the maths.

  • "They're both firm as a rock on their issues, and they're both just so goshdarn sincere, you know?""

    If Castro is sincere, then G.W. Bush is the poster child for the War on Cocaine.

    For all his "imperialist running dog" blather and "evil capitalist conspiracy" dogma, Castro is worth more money than God [exilio.com]. For a Communist, he's a pretty damn good Capitalist (Materialist, anyway).

  • The same households that have enough money to shell out $300 for a playstation II of course.
  • No matter who your talking about, presidents of big companies are always talking out of their ass. Networked games are great buddy, now if a company were smart enough to get it working right out of the box and working on BROADBAND out of it too, good. Another feature systems need is dual tv support for 2 players, that'd be sweet, I hate split screen and have 2 tv's. I wish the dreamcast would've made a better hit, marketing killed it, it has some great games though (shenmue). Oh well.
  • A port is another story entirely. There's nothing wrong with ports usually, it's when the game is designed for multiple platforms from the ground up. (With a port, they concentrated on the right things initially and then the game was good enough to warrent consideration on other platforms)

    Anyway, I believe that at least all of the EA-Sports games are available for Nintendo platforms and just abaout all others. EA is one of the few companies that does it right though. Mayby this has a bearing on their individual contract because I can't think of anyone else who develops the same games for nintendo and other platforms... Shady contracts are another story entirely either way.
  • I love my N64. Dreamcast and PS2 don't hold a candle to it, because of the games. I really cannot find a decent PlayStation game. Of all the systems I own (Atari 2600, Genesis, Nintendo 8-bit, SNES, N64, Atari Jaguar, Dreamcast, PlayStation, Sega Game Gear), the Nintendo 64 is the best by far.

    The reason, in my opinion, is that they really think they have their philosophy right. They are striving for quality over quanity, whereas Sony is the other way around.

    Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Zelda: Majora's Mask are great games. I would much rather have my N64 with two or three great games than a PlayStation 2 with lots of mediocre games and ports. Who needs all these new sports games? Seriously... all they do is update the stats.

    -Mike
  • I think someone went to Blockbuster rented "Rising Sun" last night. :P
  • A badly translated Sega PC Engine game called Zero Wing... someone gave a link to a Flash movie with excellent dubbed voice actors... But anyway, considering the joke's over a month old (and Slashdot's just catching on), you can basically say it's an old joke that's lost its charm.
  • Of course the real, and most ominous, parallel between late-80s Japan and the US 'new economy' of the 90s today is that both were basically the products of massive expansion of the money supply on the part of both countries' central banks.

    Anyone familiar with the Austrian theory of the trade cycle [mises.org] will know that Japan's economic woes of the 90s were exacerbated by yet more neo-Keynesian expansionary measures, such as negative interest rates etc. The Fed's gratuitous money pumping of 1999 (under the guise of pro-active Y2K measures) was performed with similar goals in mind; unfortunately they will make the liquidation of malinvestments all the more painful.

    Greenspan's godlike status is already looking decidedly shaky; perhaps the inevitable recession will make the world realise that you cannot 'turn a stone into bread' by printing money.

  • To start this reply I'd first like to say I both work in the video game industry, and am a classic gaming lover. And a warning, this will probably be a rather long bunch of rambling. That being said...

    When was the last time you played one of those great games of old that are so much better than todays? Those games were SO GREAT because they pushed the technology of the time. These days, there's not enough there to keep people interested. Just yesterday I was playing Gauntlet 2, and enjoyed it, but got quickly bored. Why? Because it's been done, and MUCH BETTER, since then. A game is great compared to what there is at the time.

    And, you know why it's hard to get games through on a console system? Something called quality control (or atleast an attempt at it). Sony nearly killed the video game industry with the release of Playstation, because it was so easy to become a developer for. Suddenly, the market is flooded with mediocre games amongst a few gems, and people buy them. What happens when someone who's not an avid gamer buys and game and it sucks? He stops playing games for a while. Hell, if he buys a game and doesn't enjoy it, why waste money on more games he probably won't enjoy. I don't think this way, gamers don't think this way, but the general public does. You can say I'm wrong but you can't argue with numbers.

    And sorry to tell you, but a bunch of hackers throwing a console together with GPL'd software will be KILLED. Why? Lack of big-names. People buy consoles for what games will be there. How many people bought a Dreamcast specifically because it had Soul Calibur or Shenmue? How many people bought a Playstation specifically because it had the Final Fantasy series? MILLIONS.

    Oh, and if you want to talk innovative, play some of Sonic Teams games. TRY to tell me Chu Chu Rocket isn't a greatly addictive, and DIFFERENT game. Sadly it sold like crap...because people want more of the same-thing.

  • I loved the 8-bit NES. And even the SNES had some really cool games on it.

    For a long time, the SNES was the most popular pre-dedicated-3D game console ever created, from a company that prides itself on creating games that concentrate on fun over flash. But to state "even the SNES had some really cool games on it?" Understatement #1.

    And look at where they've gone. Nintendo dropped the ball on Metroid and Mario; in the meantime, Final Fantasy, Castlevania, and Mega Man are on Playstation.

    What? The N64 and Game Boy have great first-/second-party games. IMO, they certainly haven't done poorly with any of them. If you're talking about the sparse releases of same-ole games featuring their most recognizable characters, it's called "keep 'em wanting more" (Pokemon excluded). Compare the Mario games to the Rockman/Mega Man games: Almost every Mario game is distinctly different, and nobody I've read or spoken with has ever suggested that they are all just blurry afterimages of previous efforts like Mega Man (which is also a great game series, but something that you will never see from Nintendo).

    Granted, Final Fantasy et al. are enjoyable series, but even today Nintendo is thriving without them. Nintendo produces a lot of compelling exclusive content (heh). If Sony and MS rely exclusively on third parties, that's their concern.

    And Zelda? Well, I heard the new ones were decent 3D remakes of the original, but that's it.

    Oh, so that's what you've heard? Well, if I were to tell you my opinions on Zelda, you wouldn't hear that from me.

    Why buy a game system that has like two or three decent games?

    For some of us, those two or three games (understatement #2) justify the cost of owning the only system on which they run. And that's exactly Mr. Yamauchi's point: Quality is more important than quantity, so it's wiser in the long run to concentrate on attracting developers who share that philosophy. I really prefer this Nintendo over the NES-era Nintendo of yore, when even neatly-wrapped feces could be emblazoned with the multi-pointed Nintendo seal of approval.

    No, I think Nintendo has a LOT of catching up to do before they can start talking about how other people don't know how to write games, or function in the gaming industry.

    Nobody's forcing those other companies to listen to this one guy's opinion, but his company is doing so well (oh yes, it is) that he may be wiser than they/you/I think.

    I'd normally hate to sound so apologistic for some big international corpo, but you have to give Nintendo credit for everything they've done for modern gaming. And I don't want to offend you or those who moderated you up, but I honestly thought your post was flamebait when I read it a few hours ago. Then I come back and it's scored 5, Insightful, and I had to post _something_.

    < tofuhead >
    --

  • I think you must have more information about the Japanese economic system than I do(easily possible). From what I've heard, the Japanese system has been in no-growth or recession for the past decade. This doesn't seem to me to be a hugely successful system, unless there are some mitigating factors I am unaware of.

    --John
  • Hm. I have to disagree in your opinion about Final Fantasy IX. The story, I thought, was excellent all the way through. The random encounters were only a little bit too frequent, and were generally very balanced. And I *loved* the final battle. Though I will note that I think that was because Steiner saved the world(entire party knocked off their feet, and Steiner with all the status-nullification and auto-regen just keeps hitting the thing until it goes down). Not to even mention the huge ending movie.

    I agree with your last statement, though: I'll just keep my eyes open, and play the games that I think are fun.

    --John
  • You know perfectly well I was talking about the computer gaming industry :).
  • What a lame interview... We don't need the president of Nintendo to tell us what we've all been expecting for months...
  • The Japanese system is good at producing, but bad at innovation. They made good vcr's cheap, but somehow missed the internet completely. The reason they're not doing well is because they're not "catching up" anymore. When they were doing that, they knew what to produce, and did so efficiently. Now that they're forced to innovate and compete, the keiretsu system, with its massive and often slow-moving companies, is holding them back.
  • Sorry Carl. She was right. The best translation for keiretsu in a single word is "conglomerate." That was all she was right about, though.
  • This is one area I have to disagree with him (El Presidente) about.

    The best thing to happen to the FPS world isn't the neat-o engine of Q3, but was the networking for these games. I have played, and I'm sure others have, CS and Q3 for hours on-line. It's the same thing, but against people it's much more interesting and viceral.

    If Nintendo ignored the online side of games, then I don't see how they can survive. IMHO, this goes for the rest of they game makers. Oh, don't get me wrong, they will survive, because plenty of people will buy and play single player games, but they won't be the dominate force they are now.

    david
  • Here's some simple math for anyone who's curious:

    HL sold around 2 million units
    The average wholesale price was probably around $25
    Valve's royalty was between 20-50% of wholesale. (Probably on the higher side, since I believe valve funded it themselves.)

    Just guessing from number of employees and development time, HL's development cost was probably around $4 million.

    At 20% that's 2M * $25 * .2 - $4M = $6M
    At 50% that's 2M * $25 * .5 - $4M = $21M

    Both of those numbers are "FAR more" than 200K :)

  • Why focus on the hardware when, really, all the interesting stuff is in the software?

    All the money is made in software, too, though. *ALL* the money, AFAIK. If the software doesn't support their platform, they lose on the hardware. It may not be interesting, but *somebody* has to make the hardware, and Nintendo's been doing that for a while now. Nintendo is simply trying to keep the same business model that made them big after the multi-platform spew of crap that happened in the first half of the '80's which critically wounded the industry at the time...

    Yamauchi is right. Consoles aren't like appliances. Maytag doesn't make money selling you the clothes or food that go with your appliances.
  • Keiretsu: "A network of businesses that own stakes in one another as a means of mutual security, especially in Japan, and usually including large manufacturers and their suppliers of raw materials and components." (Dictionary.com)

    Zaibatsus are large, traditionally family-owned corporations, while the keiretsus are just monopolistic corporate giants -- Zaibatsus are tighter-knit, and often act as one corporation, whereas the keiretsus are more of a trade ring of companies cooperating for a common goal, often with a large bank at the core.
    ---------------
  • 2 million people have the game or 2 million people bought the game? Theere's a big difference. My school there's about 15 Half-Life geeks. Guess what? All 15 of those kiddos have burned copies from the original CD, only 2-3 use the original CD key, but 15 people are palying half-life for $40. If that trend is world-wide, then out of the 2 million people who have the game, then only 130,000 paid $40 for it, still that's a cool 5.2 million bucks.
  • I think what Yamauchi meant was, if the games don't differentiate the system, then the only thing left is price. If you have three systems with the exact same games available for each, then why would you choose one over the other? The only thing left is price.

    Porting is best for game development companies, but not for console makers. That's why Nintendo has a bunch of 1st and 2nd party developers making exclusive games for Nintendo's platforms. It's one of the ways they differentiate their hardware. Nintendo is the only place to get Mario or Pokemon games.

  • thanks for that link! oh man, this [planetstarsiege.com] is kick-your-ass funny.


    --
  • conventional wisdom is that its better to make somebody wait a couple times for a little bit then to make them wait once for a long time. because they may either thing something is broken or not want to wait and go somewehre else. i didn't say its a good reason. just a reason.
  • super smash brothers. that game kicks ass.
  • or like 99.999% of dot coms. thats why a tax break won't help the economy. people will just go back to investing stupidly.
  • so pages load faster. also probably gives more banner space or something.
  • FAR is at least in the millions. Don't be an idiot, it was game of the year and it's still selling, plus it has had mods out the ass coming down the pipe which have been popular.

    For some perspective, just licensing the Quake 3 engine costs $300,000 per title. Now, I know Half-Life was a Quake 2 engine title, but it should be realized that expenses this large are not abnormal for a game development team.

    Here's a figure for you. Half-Life has sold over 1.5 Million copies worldwide, I believe a little closer to 2. Let's do some math, how do you get a $200k profit from 1.5 million sales?

    That makes sense.. FOR ME TO POOP ON
  • Mario 64 was decent? I'm sorry that's not how I would judge it. Before TombRaider and all that crap, Mario64 was the first game to give a really awesome 3rd person 3D control system. At the time it came out, I remember being completely blown away by it: this was at the time I still had a Pentium 60 running Win95 (it gives me a headache just thinking about it). Anyway, my point is that Mario64 was fun for it's simplicity: in 15 years, i'll still be able to start playing it and have a good time....and I don't think i would say that about many games!
  • The two good games for n64? What about Mario64? WaveRace? GoldenEye? Perfect Dark? MarioCart? I would say those games together with the Zelda games definitely justify the n64's existance. On Playstation besides Metal Gear, there have been very few games that seem to be classics to me.
  • I thought the handheld videogames were pretty innovative... In particular, the Lynx pioneered networked videogames a good 8 years before they really caught on...

    And while it's been a good 5 years since a game really latched onto me and took control of my life, that's a lot less than 2 decades...

    >Brighter & Gorier may sell well, and certainly
    >the modern gaming consoles are a good deal more
    >impressive than the Atari 400's, numbers-wise,
    >but I'm not seeing the content.

    This Red Herring is raised continually as a mantra for the problems with the industry, and yet the chart toppers are games like Age of Empires, Roller Coaster Tycoon, and The Sims. None of these games push the envelope graphically or gorily, but instead provide solid (if sometimes even creative) gameplay within established genres.

    And despite the success of these simpler games, I agree with Mr. Yamauchi that solid, basic gameplay has taken a backseat to many more complex games with too many sequels. Nobody plays these games. More importantly, no one buys them, and yet they just keep coming.

    >IMHO, the best thing that could happen to the
    >games industry would be if a bunch of (REAL)
    >hackers got together, threw a truly spectacular
    >console together, and wrote a killer game for
    >it, under the GPL.

    Why bother? Their target audience, also mostly hackers, already have computers. Why not instead skip the whole console bit and go straight to the killer game? This is one instance where the better mousetrap is simply waiting to be built.

  • I like Nintendo. Always liked their games. Now I'm an old fart and want to GPL everything. But that's a different issue.

    But read what Mr. Yamauchi says:

    "If the software was the same no matter which system you buy, then the only point we'd be able to sell on is price."

    Umm, there is one other point. Horsepower. Which is what Mr. Yamauchi has been disparaging for the entire rest of the article.

    This doesn't bode well for Nintendo. Nintendo lives in a world where being distracted by shiny objects is the object. And he's trying to say that distractions don't necessarily need to be so shiny.

    Maybe he's right. There's more to entertainment than pixel power. But this is more than a tacit acknowledement that Nintendo's pixel power might not match that of their competitors. And guess what, if the gaming software industry produces for more than one platform, then hardware manufacturers will have to compete on more than just price.
  • Yea, it's all nice and good to have a playstation or whatever (I hear some dreamcast games are nice), but the N64 has the group games down cold.

    Starfox 64, Bomberman 64, Goldeneye, MarioKart 64, Super Smash Bros...

    Any one of those games (Starfox being the weakest of the 5) can easily waste hours, days, weeks.

    I've always found Nintendo would blow away the other systems when it came down to simply how "fun" the games were.

    Of course, I wasn't very fond of FF7 or FF8 (showy CG, wahoo), and Mega Man hasn't been fresh for ages.

    Then again, all I play are PC games now. I can't find something on a console that's as fun as Tribes or Baldur's Gate.

    Moller
  • Get the FAQ here [gamefaqs.com].

    HA!

  • Hmn. Apparently Doctor Bronner didn't die after all.

    All One!

    Dilute! Dilute!

    love,
    -carl
  • He's right -- the last time the videogame industry blindly tried to follow the movie industry was with Dragon's Lair. That (along with Warner mismanagement of Atari, the then main supplier of videogames) killed videogames until Nintendo resurrected it with Zelda.

    Games are about real-time object/constraint puzzles visualized in 2-D or 3-D plus time. Graphics and sound are the candy to make it go down easier. Too much sugar makes a good buzz (and good profit for the dealer), but also an upset stomach and long-term aversion.

  • Yes, we can learn a lot from the Japanese - including what not to do.

    That was a very nice, informative piece on Japanese companies, but I could have sworn the overall topic was the game industry, not Japan's economic/corporate situation.

    If you've anything to say about Nintendo, please, by all means, do so. Though your post may have been informative, it was actually fiarly off topic, at least in my opinion.

    Best of luck in the future.

  • But there is one. It's called Xtank. Compile it with the -3DGRAPHICS option and it is too sweet.

    Man, if only that weren't currently vapor. Is there a cvs project to revive Xtank? The last version I saw was running under Solaris 4.0, and ever since then I've tried a couple of times to do the compile on whatever Unix I had available. Not a trivial task, and I usually get fed up with poorly written code (alas, beautiful game, hideous code) before I get anywhere.

    So, why isn't there a SourceForge project to get Xtank rpm-able, and maybe in the major distros. Even build in the elusive 3DGRAPHICS option, so as to keep the look.

    xgal's not bad either

    Ushers will eat latecomers.

  • I'm taking his words with a grain of salt, because

    1: the N64 had crap for games.
    2: The Game Cube will be a proprietary system (i.e., a DVD system with 3" discs, as reported a few months back). So in other words, don't buy a Game Cube if you expect it to function as a DVD player as well as a console system.
    3: Several of Nintendo's key developers when the SNES was a hot item jumped ship for Sony when it was announced that the N64 was to be a cartridge system, because it was cheaper to produce a CD instead of a ROM cartridge.
  • Eh... I thought it was Dune II and 6-7 years of ripoffs. I always saw C&C as an outgrowth of Dune II. 'Course, I suppose I may be a bit biased...


    --Fesh

  • Do you even realise what a net profit is?
  • Can someone explain to me how President of Nintendo=Ruthless Communist Dictator. Maybe I missed something in the interview.
    Glad to be of service. He's wrong.

    Now we could leave it at that, but I'll add some explanation:

    Fidel, essentially, is a man of many virtues, who fell - to some degree - prey to his own power. He has a remarkable record - for a country comparable to his, his people have excellent public education and an excellent health system. Cuba excells about any economically comparable country in these and a few other parameters.

    Also, it is noted, he is a man of great personal integrity, who has not enriched himself, nor installed his own clique of parasites in the country. OTOH, we all know he has some kind of absolute power, and he made whatever compromises are necessary to get and keep it, including putting his opponents in prison or to the wall. And of course, this absolute power today hinders progress of his country certainly as much as the undeclared American war on him does.

    But, go to cuba, and listen to the people. You will find them bitching and complaining about the goverenment and the system and whatever all the time. But at the same time they just love Fidel. Listen and understand.

    Now lets contrast that to the Nintendo Chairman. He's a very rich guy, who runs a megacorp for a gazillion of years. In his time, his company has perfected the selling of technologically mediocre junk to consumers at inflated prices. At the same time, he cultivated the devloper relation to independant software houses in a way soviet gulag prisons are run. Among game developers, working for or with microsoft is seen like a fresh breeze of fairness, partneship, openness and understanding compared to the style Nintendo has championed.

    In doing all that, he earned tons of money for his shareholders and himself. His contribution to the public good can be summed up with 'Mario'.

    So now you know why you prefer the one over the other.

    f.

  • Re:WTF (Score:1)

    by Sits ( 117492 )
    To an extent it could be argued that if you go back to the late 80s writing a game for the NES was not to disimillar to a dictatorship. Catridge prices were high and any attempt to do something different (such as the Game Genie) was beaten down upon by the big N
  • And Zelda? Well, I heard the new ones were decent 3D remakes of the original, but that's it.

    First you lament that there haven't been enough sequels for Metroid and Mario. Then you accuse the two excellent Zelda games of being remakes?

    Actually, the two Zelda games are quite good. They certainly don't resemble the NES original, other than sharing a sense of adventure, and fun gameplay based on puzzle-solving.

    There are a bunch of other good games for the Nintendo 64, including Paper Mario, Harvest Moon, Donkey Kong 64, Mario 64, and even Mario Kart 64, among others. Granted, it's a tough system to develop for, but I think you're just trolling if you think Nintendo is clueless about how to "function in the gaming industry." They've produced three successfuly home systems, and still make a ton of money on Gameboy.

    Oh, and you can get Mega Man on N64--there's a port of Mega Man Legends.

  • 1. Nintendo had great games. Better signal to noise ratio than sony I would say, although the playstation had more games produced which would even it out I guess. 2. Nintendo isn't stupid. I don't like that fact that games are going to be proprietary but I don't think that it will really hurt sales of the hardware very much at all because when it comes out in 9 months, most of the people that want DVD players will have them eighther on their computers or as a component. I think that more of my friends have DVD players than don't right now, and DVD's are quickly becoming more common. 3. I think that if Nintendo can focus on creating good games they will be fine. Designers and developers are everything, but I think Nintendo will do alright. They have alot of good companies working with them.

  • Really? (Score:2)

    by pb ( 1020 )
    The last thing I heard was that Nintendo told Square to stuff it.

    I'm interested; could you post a link?
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
  • That's it! Hemos is really a Japanese warlord about to take over the Earth and his post was badly translated to English!

    Obligatory AYBABTU comment

  • IMHO... (Score:2)

    by jd ( 1658 )
    The gaming industry has not produced a genuinely innovative product for almost 20 years.

    Brighter & Gorier may sell well, and certainly the modern gaming consoles are a good deal more impressive than the Atari 400's, numbers-wise, but I'm not seeing the content.

    Worse, with all sorts of patents and copyrights blocking development of software by 3rd parties, what we have is the monopolistic, power-crazed attitude that most Free Software/Open Source advocates know and hate, because THAT destroys innovation far more than co-operation ever could.

    Is it "News for Nerds"? Unquestionably, yes. So would a nuclear war. Does that mean we should be supporting or encouraging it's neolithic attitudes? Nope.

    IMHO, the best thing that could happen to the games industry would be if a bunch of (REAL) hackers got together, threw a truly spectacular console together, and wrote a killer game for it, under the GPL.

  • or like 99.999% of dot coms. thats why a tax break won't help the economy. people will just go back to investing stupidly.

    Yes, and the US Government does so much better. If they keep it they will undoubtedly invest it in a $400 claw hammer or a $500 toilet seat.

    If you aren't smart enough to keep your own money out of goofy investments, then that is your problem, not mine. I want my money back!

  • Nintendo has catching up to do?

    http://ign64.ign.com/news/30185.html [ign.com]

    Suuuuure.

    Nintendo knows what they're doing. If the games don't appeal to you, that's fine. But it's clear that they can attract customers.

    When the second Zelda for the N64 released, it sold more copies than currently available PSX2s in North America. I think Sony needs to rethink their strategy. Not only are the games not much fun, but they can't even get the hardware to the consumer so that they can play the good games that *do* exist.
  • Actually, best thing that could happen is if a bunch of real hackers got together, use a truly mediocre console (like the Playstation or Gameboy) and wrote a killer game for it, under the GPL.

    Unless I'm misunderstanding your intent, spectacular sound and graphics do not a great game make. A great game is a great game, and the sound and graphics are nearly irrelevant.


    -AS
  • I couldn't follow his logic there. I couldn't follow why ports would lead to a hardware war -- quite the opposite I'd think, and then he says [correctly] that systems are secondary, and games primary.

    If games are primary isn't it best if they are ported to all platforms to defray production costs?
  • Redundant?? no way! this will never stop being funny! And where the all are the "All your base are belong to us" T-shirts?


    --
  • Ahh, but great hackers do not make great game designers necesarily. Let's see: Shigeru Miyamoto, Peter Molyneux, etc. They're not exactly John Carmack style hackers are they?

    Anyway, this guy doesn't seem to get the point that his own company(Nintendo) keeps proving over and over again: games are an essential part of life for kids! Why do you think Mario, Zelda, Pokemon, etc have been so essential? I think that as long as there are kids, there will be a market for videogames. And then there are all of the old "kids" (like me, well I'm 21 so i'm not a kid :) ) who have grown up with videogames and 'll stay gamers for the rest of our lives.

    The point he makes about gameplay being more important than graphics is something that any gamer knows instinctively anyway.
  • Well - we've been taking lessons from them on how to create a "Bubble Economy", at least.

    The NASDAQ hit a two year low yesterday in case you weren't looking.

    Most tech companies are posting big profit warnings. Lucent appears to have fundamental financial problems. Motorola is laying off a ton of people. These things do not a collapse make, but it makes Greenspan's warnings of "Irrational Exuberance" hit a lot closer to home.

    The bubble burst in Japan a decade ago, and they still haven't really recovered. The similarities, especially in real estate over-valuation, are kind of scary.

    love,
    -carl
  • Oh, and FUCK YOU BITCH!!

    Please, there's no need for such mysogynistic language if you don't want to be written off as a troll.

    First, the word "Kairetsu" doesn't translate to "conglomorate". The word roughly means "low-revenue startup business". There is NO FUCKING WAY GE would be considered a Kairetsu. VA Linux is even too big to be a Kairetsu.

    Perhaps she was thinking of the word "Zaibatsu"?

    -carl

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • until they read "Game Over: Press Start To Continue." Excellent book on the history of Nintendo. Don't count Nintendo out; the N64 was a failure, yes. By Nintendo standards. Any other company would have considered it a fantastic success.
  • Not quite. But cartridges are right out, due to cost, time to manufacture, and limited space.

  • But cartridges are right out, due to cost, time to manufacture, and limited space.

    Then why did Nintendo choose cartridges for Game Boy Advance (a portable 32-bit console that's about as powerful as Super NES), even when GAMECUBE uses a DVD-like medium? Why is the Neo-Geo Pocket Color cart-based instead of CD-based like newer Neo-Geo consoles? Answer: Cartridges don't skip when the game is played in a moving vehicle on a bumpy road. Cartridge reading hardware is cheaper (handheld consoles MUST be inexpensive to be attractive) and doesn't break as easily (remember early CD consoles?).


    All your hallucinogen [pineight.com] are belong to us.

  • To be honest, I don't recall ever seeing a 2D game on N64. Was the hardware not capable of it??

    You've obviously never played Mischief Makers, Yoshi's Story, Kirby 64, or The New Tetris. You can do a 2D game in APIs such as OpenGL/Mesa3D, Direct3D, and whatever the N64 and GAMECUBE consoles use; simply draw each sprite as a quad. A few of the later Super NES games with Super FX (notably Yoshi's Island) used this technique.

    And $90 for a cartridge didn't turn my crank either.

    More like $50-$70 for a cartridge. And million-seller "Player's Choice" games were marked to $40 anyway.


    All your hallucinogen [pineight.com] are belong to us.
  • I think Nintendo just resents the hell out of the fact that they're continually being forced to invest in designing and marketing new hardware. Remember how much they dragged their feet on the SNES and the N64?
    --
  • Nintendo was *so* paranoid about this stuff that they released a cartridge system and further crippled their games and their development--and people still dumped the ROMs

    Actualy, it had a lot more to do with the fact that their hardware was still pretty exspensive at the time compared to sony or sega's. They didn't want to spend the money on whole mechanical system for a CD-ROM

    Rate me on Picture-rate.com [picture-rate.com]
  • in the 1980's: IBM figured they could make billions by making better hardware (i.e. PS2)

    Do you mean the IBM PS/2, or the Sony PS2? Your sentance really aplies equaly well to both :P

    Rate me on Picture-rate.com [picture-rate.com]
  • Right here [atomo.com]

    Rate me on Picture-rate.com [picture-rate.com]
  • Approximately two million copies, I doubt the developer gets more than 10%, that's $200,000.

    If the games were being sold for $1...

    Rate me on Picture-rate.com [picture-rate.com]
  • That's because a lot of people are only impressed by the gee-whizz crap. I think Final Fantasy 7 is one of the most playable games ever, I was on it for 2 months straight, and one of my friends reckons it's crap because the graphics aren't as good as PC graphics, despite the playability.
  • Just because he's good at 3D engines doesn't make him an expert in all things computer related.

    However, he is a part owner in id, so it's fair to assume he knows a bit about the business side of the game industry.

  • To a certain extent, you are partially right. There are only so many types of games that can be created based on so many play mechanics. Even the most recent and popular games still rely on time-honoured play mechanics that have been around since the 2600 days.

    Take Metal Gear Solid, for instance. Yes, it is an incredible game (probably my favorite, despite the ease at which I can beat it these days). It's presentation is practically flawless, it's story solid (no pun intended) and it's play mechanics sound.

    But, as I believe Hideo Kojima once said, it's still using some of the most basic, fundamental game play techniques as games 10 or 15 years old -- you're still in a maze with a top-down view (Pac Man) with lots of weapons and espionage tactics (the original Metal Gear for the MSX). The reason MGS is so damn awesome is that it is so simple yet elegant -- it combines simple, easy to master play control with a good story and a great graphics and sound engine. It wasn't particularly innovative outside of the numerous camera angles, but it was such a fine example perfect video game production that it didn't matter.

    It seems that all of the best games (IMHO) have that trait -- they take time honored video game play control and mechanics and kick them up a notch with more features and perhaps better graphics and sound. Castlevania: SOTN on the PSX is a good example -- it isn't that much different than the first Castlevania, but it adds more play control options, an RPG element and prettier graphics to produce one of the more memorable PSX games. The Final Fantasy series is the same -- the new PSX games in the series aren't that much different than the SNES or NES games in the series, but they are able to convey the story of the game through better graphics and sound. The fundamental play mechanics are still basically the same. (The FF series is, btw, my person favorite line of games. I'm an RPG freak.)

    It's kind of like movies. Directors have been using the same classic editing techniques since DW Griffith and the Lonedale Operator. The special effects have gotten nicer, the sets have become bigger and the photography is improved, but some of the basic film editing and shooting techniques used today are as old as the medium itself. Some innovation still occurs, though (such as the Matrix special f/x), but the fundamentals are always there. And yet we still love movies.

    Enough rambling from me. Have I made any sense?

    BTW, on an off-topic note, I just graduated from university this week and hope to eventually get into the video game biz, designer or developer, hell, even programmer. I'm thinking of taking a summer-long course at DigiPen in Vancouver or Seattle. Anybody been? I was accepted for their 2-year BSc. course in 1997, but I ended up getting a scholarship elsewhere so I put that on the backburner. Any thoughts from anybody who's heard of or been to that school?

    J
  • This is the gu[y] who refuses to let square make Gamecube games because they abandoned the Super Nintendo for the Playstation.

    Hm, it seems he and Fidel DO have something in common after all. Both are power-hungry vengeful megalomaniacs.

    BTW, my spamproofing is that way because that's my surname. Really.

  • Success? Amazing economic performance? You mean the way the Japanese economy actually contracted last year? The keiretsu are a major cause of Japan's stagnation. The reluctance to "restructure" them (i.e. go through rounds and rounds of painful layoffs, like the USA did during the 80s and early 90s) is why Japan's recession has lasted so inexplicably long. Maybe you're just blatantly trolling, or karma whoring, but the Japanese economy isn't the job destroyer it was during the 80s. Their economy overheated and popped back in 1989, and they've been in the toilet ever since.

    What's the relevance to Nintendo? I dunno, you didn't mention them either.

  • I'm sure I saw a link to the story on here once. Probably about a month ago come to think of it!
  • "Venture capitalists, in particular. That's why these people are pouring money into the field right now.

    Q: Because they don't know how difficult it really is?

    Y: Right. They give money to people that really should be unemployed, and they in turn round up some friends..."

    Does this sound like any web board you guys have heard of?

  • I'm so sick of seeing this complaint. It's like saying every movie since 1927 has merely been a vehicle for talking and you'll only watch movies from before that because that's when the writers would really focus on the plot. There are plenty of fun games that also happen to have advanced graphics.

    Metal Gear Solid has incredible, state of the art graphics. Sure the game was more complex then Pitfall, but did that make it bad? Of course not. It was a fantastic game. Now it wasn't good because of the graphics, it was good because it was a tight, well told adventure. The graphics were just the metaphorical icing on the cake.

    Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 and 2 are another example. They are just instant classics and for pure fun factor they deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as Mario Kart and Metroid. Both are as addictive as crack, and incredibly fun. Despite throughly beating the hell out of Tony Hawk 2 15 times, I still go back and play around in the free skate mode because it's just raw gameplay. Sure, there's pretty graphics too, but I don't keep coming back becuase of the polygon count in the skaters.

    Again, old Atrai games are fun. But don't write off any game made in the past ten years just because there's a handfull that are style over substance. There's plenty that are a solid combination of both.

    -Jeff

  • The Kairetsu system (a Kairetsu is a huge Japanese conglomorate, something like Walmart, Microsoft, Intel and General Motors all rolled into one), and the close state control (the MITI controls every aspect of business life in Japan, and the politicians have no say) means that Japanese businesses can afford to take risks and take a firm line and think of the far future. They, rightly or wrongly, do not need to worry about whining shareholders - shareholders have very few rights under Japanese law.

    The Japanese capitalist system is not really a free market at all in fact. There are only a dozen Kairetsu, which between them control some 95% of the Japanese economy, and do so with the backing of the government. They do not directly compete, operating in a cartel like manner, and are anything but free.

    One can see this corporate culture affects how the Japanese do business - they needn't be innovative, and according to our values the entire shebang should collapse, but the fundamental values of Japanese society keep it afloat and ensure it is a success.

    It is amusing to note that in the west we assume that Low taxes + Free sink or swim market + no regulation = economic success. Japan breaks all these rules, with a stifleing amount of regulation, huge tax rates and amazing economic performance.

    We could still learn a lot from the Japanese, which is why interviews such as this one are very useful.
    --
    Clarity does not require the absence of impurities,

  • Bah. (Score:3)

    by pb ( 1020 ) on Friday February 23, 2001 @11:26AM (#407375)
    I loved the 8-bit NES. And even the SNES had some really cool games on it.

    Metroid, Super Metroid, Final Fantasy 1-3 (american), Mario 1-3, at least some of the Zelda games, Castlevania, Mega Man...

    And look at where they've gone. Nintendo dropped the ball on Metroid and Mario; in the meantime, Final Fantasy, Castlevania, and Mega Man are on Playstation.

    And Zelda? Well, I heard the new ones were decent 3D remakes of the original, but that's it.

    Why buy a game system that has like two or three decent games?

    No, I think Nintendo has a LOT of catching up to do before they can start talking about how other people don't know how to write games, or function in the gaming industry.
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].

  • Re:Single platform games (Score:3)

    by ivan256 ( 17499 ) on Friday February 23, 2001 @11:57AM (#407376)
    Attitudes like yours really irritate me. When a developer spends their time making a game that will run on multiple platforms two thigs happen.
    First the game is limited by the technology of the least innovative platform minus the performance hit of any abstraction layers etc... Second, lots of time is spent making the game work on other platforms instead of paying attention to details, and the details can make or break a game. This is why almost all games that are developed with more then one platform target to start with usually suck.

    A perfect recent example of this is Oni. Oni is a great concept for a game. The gameplay is good too. But the details aren't there. The sound can get distorted or latent, when people fall down the stairs they land horizontal instead of at the slope of the stairs, the clipping sucks, they didn't spend enough time choosing their textures... The list goes on.

    One last point. The console industry isn't the computer industry (yet). Lets hope it doesn't become the same. Let's look at why: The PC industry started off by making varied and innovative hardware. Then, when IBM clones came out hardware innovation stopped in the consumer space, and we've been stuck with the same outdated underdesigned hack of a hardware platform in the mainstream for the last 20 years. Now, in 2001 you have the console gaming industry with some really new and innovative hardware archetectures like the PS2 and the Gamecube. Do you really think that the software will benifit from having to run on such varied hardware? No, it wont, so what will happen is that all of the future game systems will have to be extremely similar in order to compete in the market. There won't be any innovation in the console hardware industry anymore.

    It's ok if you can't get every game for every console. It's ok if you end up with more then one console. In the end there will be a larger variety of game types and amazing hardware out there. That would be great!

  • Um Hemos.... (Score:3)

    by Rombuu ( 22914 ) on Friday February 23, 2001 @11:24AM (#407377)
    John Ricciardi of Video Senki has a great interview with Hiroshi Yamauchi, president of Nintendo, his "absolute favorite" for the same reason Castro is his fav head of state: "They're both firm as a rock on their issues, and they're both just so goshdarn sincere, you know?""

    Well, all of those words are in English, they just don't amke any sense in that order....

  • Re:IMHO... (Score:3)

    by Broccolist ( 52333 ) on Friday February 23, 2001 @02:05PM (#407378)
    20 years? Come on. That's how long the gaming industry has existed! Are you suggesting that the current crop of games is not innovative, even compared to no games at all?

    There were dozens of genres of games invented in the past 20 years: side-scrollers, space shooters, RPGs, first-person shooters, third-person shooters, platformers, puzzle games, adventure games, turn-based strategy, real-time strategy, business simulators, dating simulators, flight simulators, and so on. There are more genres than I can count! You're saying that none of this is innovative? IMHO, the gaming industry has been amazingly prolific, especially considering the short span of time in which it has existed.

    On the other hand, free software programmers have consistently proven that they are completely incapable of creating a decent game. All free software projects aiming to create a complete, commercial-quality game have been dismal failures. The only free games of note, such as Counterstrike, are those built on top of existing commercial engines. The OSS development model is good for some applications, but games are definitely not one of them.

    And "threw a truly spectacular console together"? Cluestick: manufacturing hardware requires capital. Free software, by definition, will never produce hardware. So save your GPL rhetoric for a topic where it's appropriate.

  • Yup, the game industry's a real bitch (Score:3)

    by robson ( 60067 ) on Friday February 23, 2001 @05:46PM (#407379)
    Yes, you're right; there's not nearly enough innovation in games today.

    The problem is that innovative games don't consistently outsell "me-too" games. Software publishers are very cautious folk, with good reason -- in any given year, 10% of the PC games make 90% of the profit.

    Consumers vote with their wallets. If publishers aren't rewarded for supporting innovative development houses, then innovative games won't get made.
  • He's got some good points, especially about how much time and money it takes to make a game today. That is killing the PS2. If a developer doesn't have a blockbuster with a PS2 game, they lose money. That's one thing that Nintendo is doing with the GameCube, making it easy to program for. Maybe XBox will be easy too, since it's basically a PC.

    I also like his comments about ports of games to other platforms. While this makes a lot of sense to developers, in the end, if all games are out on every platform, there is really nothing to differentiate them. Nintendo has always had strong 1st and 2nd party developers who can assure exclusive games. Microsoft is trying to do that by buying lots of companies, but how much of the stuff that they do will be exclusive to the XBox? Won't most of it get ported to the PC as well? Sony has had a great relationship with Square, but most of the games for PlayStation are made by 3rd party developers, and are usually ported to other platforms.

  • Single platform games (Score:3)

    by scorbett ( 203664 ) on Friday February 23, 2001 @11:34AM (#407381) Homepage
    Nintendo's business is to make games that can only be played on Nintendo systems. Nintendo's games only run on Nintendo's consoles, and no one else's. Our aim is to get people to think Nintendo's games are the greatest, the best in the world.

    Attitudes like this irritate me. Why focus on the hardware when, really, all the interesting stuff is in the software? Contrast to the computer industry in the 1980's: IBM figured they could make billions by making better hardware (i.e. PS2) when all the money turned out to be in the software (i.e. Micro$oft). It seems to me that hardware is becoming less and less relevant, it's the software that will really drive innovation in the games industry, especially if cross-platform console games start to get developed en masse. Nintendo's attitude of "if you want to play a Nintendo game, you must buy a Nintendo system!" seems really backwards.

    [Off Topic]: on an unrelated note, what the hell is with the page layout in this article? Why display only two or three questions and answers on a page, and then provide a link to the next page? Why not just put the entire interview on one page? I hate when web sites do that!


    --

  • Re:Bah. (Score:3)

    by Foss ( 248146 ) <<moc.ssoftae> <ta> <ssof>> on Friday February 23, 2001 @11:57AM (#407382) Homepage Journal
    FF6 (US 3) was amazing, as was Secret of Mana. Hopefully Square and Nintendo will kiss and make up sometime soon. Chocobo full-chested reptile nose buttons, and the mousebook heart of blankety blank - piff paff poof - held tortilla book slayer. Harder cone-can? Only guitarstring flop-doodle gangybone davin flurp jhsodj ouhuoe oeuho odhg dog8 3ho38 y839yg 98se9yg5hes gjhe gouye 85yg 48wg09yh4 g5shreljgh og8us9yregsdlkjrhg osr ghso o hgosy 098gy94w5sreg5h ksjdhg;sgsg until they all oufahsor.

  • Right on! (Score:3)

    by sparcv9 ( 253182 ) on Friday February 23, 2001 @11:36AM (#407383)
    Mr. Yamauchi keeps stressing the one point that I constantly gripe about. Video games are not about the graphics. They're about the gameplay. The most recent game console I own is a SuperNES, and I have no idea in which closet it now resides. I've been too busy playing my Atari 2600 games to bother to dig it out, but I might get the urge to play Zelda again some day. Oh, the days when graphics didn't mean squat, and it was all about the fun factor! Rock on, Mr. Yamauchi!

  • Re:Long overdue (Score:4)

    by John Carmack ( 101025 ) on Friday February 23, 2001 @01:28PM (#407384)
    >Half Life made net profits of just over $200,000

    Uh, no. Half Life made FAR more than that.

    The top titles still bring in lots of money, but if you don't get a hit, you probably won't recoup your development money.

    John Carmack

  • Re:Bah. (Score:4)

    by DarkEdgeX ( 212110 ) on Friday February 23, 2001 @12:54PM (#407385) Journal

    I disagree, the Nintendo 64 is doing FINE in sales, you don't see them folding camp like Sega did do you?

    Another thing-- you SEVERLY underrate Zelda 64 (and Nintendo's other games for the N64). "And Zelda? Well, I heard the new ones were decent 3D remakes of the original, but that's it."? While I haven't played Majora's Mask, the Ocarina of Time kicked ass, you'd be a fool to say that game was 'just a remake'. Sure, the gameplay shares a lot of it's roots with the original top-down games, but it's a sequel, were you expecting a complete overhaul?

    I think what he said was DEAD on-- the industry as a whole is becoming too engrossed in 'ooooh pretty'-gee whiz graphics and not with good content that involves the player. Some of gamings biggest hits weren't successful because of their presentation, but because the gameplay was ENGAGING. (Enter: Tetris, Pac-Man, etc, etc.) Exceptions of course exist, but not on the console platforms (the original Quake on the PC naturally being a break-through title) generally. If any company has a grasp on the gaming industry as a whole, it's Nintendo. Unfortunately, Nintendo just wasn't as good as Sony with courting 3rd party developers to their console. But I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone in here that would say the PS1 was technically superior to the N64, except for the lack of a CD-ROM..

  • WTF (Score:4)

    by Dr. Prakash Kothari ( 314326 ) on Friday February 23, 2001 @11:25AM (#407386)
    Can someone explain to me how President of Nintendo=Ruthless Communist Dictator. Maybe I missed something in the interview.

  • As I was ready the comments made by Mr. Yamauchi (someone who's been in the game industry longer than some of you have been alive), I realized in a lot of ways, he's very right in some of his views. I disagree slightly with the "multiple porting" thing, but his point about games and technology was dead on.

    I'm not one of those "the old days were the best", but there's something to be said when the Gameboy sells about 50% of all console products, even though their graphics are hardly state of the art. Too many developers seem to feel the need to include "super-cool anti-aliasing triple buffered coolness", then come up with a game like Oni, which had some cool ideas, but obviously fell short in the gameplay area. (Hello? Keyboard map and mouse control?)

    You can tell which games are the best, because their not just made to make money (I'm not so naive to believe that game developers don't want to make money), but you can sense they're a labor of love as well. No One Lives Forever doesn't have an "advanced" of a game engine compared to Quake 3, but for the story and humor it crushes the other FPS in the competition. Thief and Thief II, a pair of the best games developed for the FPS market, were hacked on for not having a highly developed graphical engine, though the gameplay (especially with Thief II, when it reached near perfect status) couldn't be faulted.

    The most recent example is in Final Fantasy IX. Now, I know some people have heralded it as the second coming in console games. Yes, the graphics were pretty (Princess Garnett - oh, yes.) Yes, the music was nice. But the story got lost by the second disk, the random battles became so tedius that I just about pulled my hair out, and the final end battle was as exciting as the Richard Simmon's Chest Shaving Competition.

    As for his other comments - will the gaming industry slow down? Well, with the rest of the economy, I'm sure. Then again, after the mistakes already made *cough*Daikatana investors*cough* in giving funds to new gaming startups, we'll to see if investors will be so willing to part with their cash in the future.

    In the meantime, I'll just keep my eyes open, and play the games that I think are fun.
    John "Dark Paladin" Hummel

  • innovation in the game industry (Score:5)

    by flynt ( 248848 ) on Friday February 23, 2001 @11:42AM (#407388)
    Most game companies are just "me too" companies.

    I see my limited history of gaming like this.

    1980's : Mario brothers and a decade of rip offs.

    Early 90's : Street Fighter II and 5 years of rip offs.

    Late 90's : Wolf3D/Doom and a decade of ripoffs.

    Now I know there were other great games during these times, original ones too, trust me I've played them. But this is how I have seen the gaming industry "progress."

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