Nintendo
Miyamoto reveals the time it takes to know if a game is good: “That is an important process too”
The legendary creator of Mario reveals the golden rule for every video game developer.
When Shigeru Miyamoto speaks, the world is silent. His words are the fruit of decades of experience at the highest level of video game development. We are talking not just about the creator of Mario, but about Nintendo as we know it today. Nothing would be the same without his intervention in Majora’s Mask, or the way he turns an obstacle into an asset. When he shares his knowledge of the medium, we all learn. In 1994, in an interview, the creative gave some of the keys that every developer must follow to know the quality of their product.
Shigeru Miyamoto’s design philosophy for knowing if your game is on the right track
“The important thing is how the game feels in the first 2 or 3 minutes. That’s the window of time in which the player’s heart is seized,” Miyamoto explains. “For Nintendo, until we’ve finished that core nucleus of the gameplay, we don’t add graphics. If the game is no good after we create that core, then we throw it all away. In any event, you can’t know until you go through the process of making it.”
The words alluded to the design philosophy he and his team had followed throughout his years at the company, but especially during the development of F-Zero. “If you do your experimenting in the beginning like that, you can experience all different kinds of failures. That is an important process too.”
F-Zero as we know it in its commercial version changed significantly during the development process thanks to this style of working. “We wanted to draw player character vehicles that looked more alive and vigorous, but if we added tires to the vehicles the required memory would be doubled. And if you added smoke from the tires during drifting, it would be even more. So because of all that, the cars became hovercrafts,” It’s all part of “creating that solid foundation,” which is “essential for game development.”
This is how history was made.
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