Interesting interview with Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata
Interesting interview with Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata
Recognising the importance Shigeru Miyamoto’s methodology, and teaching it within the company:
So, I have this strange sense of duty regarding the codifying of the ‘Miyamoto Methodology’, because I feel like it would be useful to the game industry if you could put it into words.
He doesn’t seem too worried about forecasts of doom and gloom for console-style games:
Indeed, we see the trend of, as the middle of the market disappears, the big hits only become bigger. For example, there’s been four 2 million sellers released on the 3DS [in Japan] in the last five months.
We checked and that’s never happened before in the Japanese game market. So, in the middle of people saying ‘packaged software doesn’t sell anymore’ and ‘dedicated game consoles are dead’, we have this happening.
On continuing to write software, even after becoming a manager:
Actually, in my case, I kept on writing code. Until I was 40.
[…] Of course, I couldn’t write code during the week days, but, well, my nights were my own, as they say. Or, I’d take work home on my days off and write code there. If I made anything cool, I’d bring it in to work on Monday to show it to everyone and they’d all be glad to look at it and that was fun for me.
When Super Smash Bros Melee wasn’t going to ship on time, Iwata personally went in and debugged it:
[…] my actual last work on programming happened when I was working as the General Manager of Corporate Planning at Nintendo. Something happened and the Gamecube version of Super Smash Brothers didn’t look like it was going to make its release date so I sort of did a code review for it (Wry Laugh).
[…] At the time, I went to HAL Labs in Yamanashi and was the acting head of debugging. So, I did the code review, fixed some bugs, read the code and fixed more bugs, read the long bug report from Nintendo, figured out where the problem was and got people to fix those…all in all I spent about three weeks like that. And, because of that, the game made it out on time.
He advocated strongly for sleep mode, which lets you suspend and resume any game at any time (on the Nintendo DS and 3DS):
The GBA SP was also a clam-shell design, so I pretty adamantly demanded of the hardware team that it went into sleep mode when it was closed. ‘This feature is absolutely essential!’ I said. However, at that time, they told me that as it would take re-working the chip so it could be turned on and off it would take a year to do it, so I had to reluctantly withdraw my request. Nevertheless, I did tell them that they had to make sure the next system they designed would be able to go into sleep mode.
I’ve long felt that sleep mode is the one of the greatest advancements in video games of all time, and very under-appreciated. I wish it was available on all games on all platforms, and I see no reason for it not to be.
It’s the reason I often find myself reaching for my 3DS, even though the Wii U and PS3 are nearby. It’s instant-on and instant-off, and I don’t have to worry about losing my progress, ever. Life is full of interruptions, and I often don’t know how long I’m going to be able to play, or how far it is to the next save point. Booting up a console feels like a commitment. Sleep mode removes these worries and just lets me play.
If I could ask for one improvement, it would be to let me suspend a game and switch to another one, then switch back to the first one, resuming exactly where I was, just as if I had put it into sleep mode. This isn’t currently the norm on any platform that I’m aware of1 2.
(via Shay Pierce, via Siracusa)
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iOS has APIs to support this feature; but, non-Apple apps almost never take advantage of it, Apple doesn’t enforce it in app review, and it isn’t common enough for users to complain about its absence. ↩︎
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Emulators can do this, of course; even Nintendo’s own Virtual Console can do it (sometimes). But not current games. ↩︎