A flood of emailers are sending me this story. So here it is. Everyone should read it. It is an interview with someone who worked at NOA about how Nintendo thinks and operates especially around the Gamecube era.
Quotes and my thoughts on the matter:
In meetings it was clear [Nintendo of Japan] could not understand why the brand had fallen so far here in North America or comprehend why the mature titles, and more powerful consoles, were so successful. Nintendo represented fun, in the purest sense of the word, they always have. When you play Nintendo games you laugh, you yell, you smile, and you jump around. You have FUN. Someone, sadly I forget who, would later quote in one of those meetings that “Consumers don’t want fun anymore; they just want to kill people… in HD.” It was actually kind of true, and with the cultural differences between Japan and the US, it was easy to understand the confusion,” said Mercury in 2011.
I don’t think anything had changed at all in America. Instead, what I think changed was Japan.
The NES came with a gun. It was the zapper. One of Nintendo’s first arcade games was a gun game (that game Marty Mcfly plays in the future in Back to the Future 2).
Zelda and Metroid were most popular in America. What did you do in those games? You ran around shooting things (or slashing them).
Shmups were one of the most popular genres in the 80s and early 90s. All you did in that game was shoot stuff.
Contra was extremely popular. What did you do in Contra? Teenage Mutant Ninja Turles games for the NES were very popular. What did you do in those games?
In the 16-bit generation, you had the rise of fighters with Street Fighter 2. What did you do in those games? You kicked and beat people up.
The gaming market had not changed at all. Even in Japan, today, that market will buy games like Grand Theft Auto. Monster Hunter is a game of violence. What has changed is Nintendo in Japan. They lost touch with the common man in the streets and do not want to admit the true nature of human entertainment. Video games have always had ‘violence’ in them. ‘Violence’ is fun in the same way playing ‘cops and robbers’ as a kid was fun.
One has to be totally divorced from reality to think anything said above is a shock.
“No one I talked to at Nintendo could understand why the company was struggling, why the whole brand was in danger of collapsing much like Sega before them. “But we’re Nintendo.” I can’t even recall how many times I heard that as a catch-all excuse.” says Mercury. ” No one, not a single soul, could believe that Nintendo was capable of being unseated as Number 1, even while it was happening right in front of them.”
This confirms something I have picked up on. Nintendo isn’t interested in being popular or successful. It is interested in only being the ‘Alpha Console’. When other consoles surpassed it in sales, this is when Nintendo freaks out. In other words, Wii U sales aren’t freaking out Nintendo today until PS4 and Xbone surpass it. When that happens, Nintendo then freaks out. Even though 3DS is declining from the DS, Nintendo is content because 3DS is the ‘Alpha Console’ of the handheld market.
At the time, Nintendo believed “Geist” — a first person shooter published by Nintendo — would be GameCube’s “Halo Killer”. Shigeru Miyamoto had contributed gameplay ideas to Geist including “object possession”. Because of Miyamoto’s minor involvement, Nintendo had strong confidence in the title, and everyone inside the meeting reassured Reggie that “Geist” would become a huge hit with the older hardcore gamers who loved “Halo”.
I didn’t know this about Geist. This confirms that inside Nintendo, Miyamoto is seen as a god.
They probably thought Pikmin 1 and 2 would be blockbusters! LMAO.
“And then at the end [of the presentation], Reggie looked around the table and basically said “Look, don’t bullshit me. How do you guys really think this thing is going to hold up?” No one said a word for a minute, and then people started just spouting off more marketing lingo and faux (self) assurance. None of these people were gamers, none of these people even LIKED video games.” says Mercury.
As long as I’ve done this website, I’ve never bullshit people. I say what I think which can cause issues. However, I hope that encourages other people who think the same way to come out. Marketing creates a ton of hype, many Kool-aid drinkers, and it is difficult to go against that.
“Pride turned to arrogance. Ugly arrogance. Nintendo started to develop contempt for the gaming community. They felt as if they were being betrayed by the gamers they created. The marketing teams started to look at gamer focused strategies with ire and spite.” says Mercury. “The “hardcore” Nintendo audience was equally cast aside. “Why bother? They’re going to buy anything we put out anyway.”
This is interesting because this is the exact same sentiment Nintendo fans (not the ‘hardcore ones’ like Rawmeatcowboy of GoNintendo but ones like me) had of Nintendo. They thought WE betrayed THEM? Hah! It is THEY who betrayed US!
Nintendo betrayed their fans with abandoning Super Mario Brothers for Mario 64, which no one today even considers a successor to the true Mario line of games.
Nintendo betrayed their fans with Zelda: Wind Waker and allowing Aonuma, who hated Classic Zelda, to transform the series into something completely different.
Note how all the Metroid fans showed up for Metroid Prime. Retro did not betray Metroid fans.
This might explain Iwata’s exasperated “IT’S NOT TRUE!” when investors pressured him about not making 2d Mario had caused so much Nintendo decline.
I consider NSMB U to be a betrayal as is NSMB 2. You can tell Nintendo didn’t want to make those games. There is no ambition in those games.
Pikmin 3 actually be allowed to have its development completed and released is a betrayal. Wind Waker HD is a massive betrayal. Mario in 3d World I perceive as a massive betrayal because all those ‘new features’ are 2d Mario features and ones we’ve been asking for Nintendo to include in 2d Mario such as being able to play the Princess Peach. But Miyamoto kept bullshitting everyone saying, “Oh, we can’t do that. We would have to program her dress.” He was intentionally reserving such a popularly requested feature for 3d Mario which Miyamoto had spent the last couple of decades (unsuccessfully) pushing.
The end years of the Wii are seen as a betrayal from Wii consumers. What was with the total collapse of no games released? Metroid: Other M was a betrayal.
The lack of a full virtual console in Generation 8 is seen by consumers as a betrayal. Consumers are even going easy and saying, “Hey, we understand if this is hard for Nintendo. Start off slow with the account system. We understand.” But Nintendo doesn’t start anything at all and keeps going the wrong way.
I’ve always had a sense that Nintendo hated their own fans. This confirms it. I think there is a larger story in that the ‘fanbase’ is despised because it limits Nintendo’s “creativity” (oh, that word!). In other words, a Metroid game is expected to be a certain way. A Mario game is expected to be a certain way. And so on.
The ‘expand the market’ idea of Wii was really about Nintendo replacing their fanbase with another one. Nintendo had to have been outright shocked when they realized that the ‘new Wii audience’ were mostly made up of lapsed gamers and were those long lost Nintendo fans. Look at the Wii sales of December 2009. What happened there? The Wii sold out and NSMB Wii rocketed off the charts. Those weren’t all ‘brand new players’. Those were the original Nintendo fans.
What I never could understand what this OBVIOUS FACT that Wii, with its virtual console, and with games like NSMB Wii were attracting the longtime Nintendo fans was so viciously denied by Nintendo. But if you think about it, if games like NSMB Wii attracted longtime fans (because it gave people the impression that Nintendo would be returning to its classic coke ways and not its weird Gamecube ways), it meant that Nintendo developers like Miyamoto were WRONG for the Gamecube, N64 and even SNES eras. The Miyamoto ‘philosophy’ was very much incorrect. Mario 64 was not a success, it was a massive failure compared to the other Mario games. Wind Waker? A failure. Mario Sunshine? It was bomba. The entire Pikmin franchise? A complete flop. Aside from 2d Mario and classic Zelda, what has Miyamoto done that was popular in video game land? There was Wii Fit and Wii Sports later on but those titles’ success was due to the LACK of Nintendo creativity as sports and fitness games are not about creativity in fiction. It signals that Nintendo’s ‘creative spirits’ are destroying the company. And the Darth Vader of those ‘creative spirits’ is Tingle.
Above: The Darth Vader of the ‘creative spirits’ that are destroying Nintendo.
“The decision was made to cede to Sony and Microsoft a bit and accept a stance of “The second console.” The reasoning was that by this point, everyone already had a PS2 or XBOX, so Nintendo, with a reduced GameCube price point, should shoot to be everyone’s Number 2,” says Mercury. “We became the “other console” and the target demographic would now be “everyone” (more accurately: “anyone”), and we’d work hard to get the last batch of “killer” games out in front of people to salvage what was left of the GameCube market and build some Nintendo buzz before this new gaming revolution [the Nintendo Wii] hit.”
This explains where everyone was saying that Nintendo was positioning the Wii as a secondary console in 2006. It made no sense to me because Nintendo was NOT saying that. However, Nintendo kept talking about ‘winning’, and I assumed people thought that was the only way Nintendo could sell more consoles is to be the secondary console to both PS3 and Xbox 360. The truth is that these investors and analysts had heard of Nintendo’s final Gamecube marketing plan and just positioned that onto the unreleased Wii.
The PS2 was almost in a league of it’s own and in Japan the Xbox was not really a threat, it still isn’t, so even though the face of games in the West was changing rapidly, the strategies used by Nintendo were slow to adapt.
I’m not sure where this ‘face of games in the West was changing rapidly’ is coming from. Games of the West have remained consistently the same. Did Nintendo forget about Mortal Kombat in the 16-bit generation? They wasted the United States Senate time due to that game and the complaint of ‘violence’. A decade later, this guy is saying the ‘face of games in the West was changing rapidly’? Get out of here. That doesn’t compute.
Again, Nintendo is a very proud company and they were facing a market shift unlike any in their history.
Again with this ‘market shift’ crap. Nintendo used to make these type of games. Look at Mach Rider from 1985. “Mach Rider takes place in the year 2112, and planet Earth has been invaded by evil forces known as Quadrunners. The player controls Mach Rider, who travels from sector to sector on a motorcycle, searching for survivors and destroying the enemies in his path.” This sounds like many games in the ‘American market’. Metroid also fits that type of game as did pre-Aonuma Zelda.
People love Smash, period. In this respect, it tends to swallow nearly all other titles it’s placed alongside.
This explains why the Smash Brothers Brawl trailer was released days later during E3 2006. Nintendo didn’t want Smash Brawl to crowd out the other games.
From a Marketing perspective, Smash is dangerous because of the content/playstyle of the game. Iconic Nintendo mascots beating the hell out of each other is an awesome gameplay experience, no one will challenge that fact, but from an overall Marketing view it’s, well, dangerous. The popular image of Mario, the widely publicly recognized one, can never be of him beating the hell out of Princess Peach or, say, of Link tossing Zelda into the fires of Brinstar, Pikachu hitting Jigglypuff with a baseball bat, so on, so forth.
Such nonsense. Mario is about beating up goombas and turtles. Zelda is about Link stabbing and chopping monsters. Metroid is about Samus shooting everything. Nintendo games are founded on violence.
Don’t get me wrong, I was thrilled to see Super Smash Bros Melee at EVO2013 (full disclosure, I was a Judge at EVO this year), but the outcry against Nintendo at the initial decision was so one-sided, so inconsiderate of what the company has to deal with to protect their brands, and just generally uninformed. Gamers want what they want, but there is always more at stake than we know.
What he is saying is that ‘gamers are stupid’. Really? Does showing Starcraft tournaments hurt Blizzard’s Starcraft 2 and current games? It doesn’t.
There are things about gaming that even Miyamoto does not yet understand. Being inside the company limits you and gives you a fishbowl perspective.
The Wii U also has elements of that whole, but once again it’s not what the market is looking for. It has sacrificed the simplicity of the Wii, but hasn’t caught the sheer hardware or media power of Microsoft or Sony. Casual gamers have moved to phones and tablets which are unsurpassed in convenience of play and cost. Title offerings aren’t exactly bold and with more and more 3rd party developers, studios that defined the last generation of games, reducing or removing support for the Wii U and a sadly lacking indie development scene… what’s the value proposition? The Wii thrived because it changed gamers expectations. The GameCube and Wii U suffered because gamers expectations have changed.
The guy being interviewed is a moron. Any use of ‘casual gamers’ or ‘hardcore gamers’ doesn’t fit the disruption model and shows the person is talking out of their ass.
The Wii U is identical to the Gamecube in so many ways. The problem is not that ‘the market has changed’. The problem is that Nintendo doesn’t want to serve ‘Classic Coke’. They keep trying to give us ‘New Coke’. The Wii didn’t succeed because it was ‘lightning in a bottle’ or anything like that. It succeeded because it go back to the fundamentals of classic gaming that are forgotten in modern gaming. The NES and Atari 2600 served a huge influence in the game design and marketing of the Wii. That cannot be denied. Those Wii Sports and NSMB sales numbers cannot be denied.
The George Harrison quote of 2003 that thinking that a single piece of software no longer is responsible for getting people to buy the hardware was reversed with the George Harrison quote in 2006 with the infamous ‘Red Steel’ magazine cover (I forget the magazine, it was the one that showed the first ‘Red Steel’ screenshots). Harrison confirmed that one piece of software does get people to buy the hardware, but you can never tell where that software will come from. Therefore, it is important to have as much software as possible. He cites Grand Theft Auto 3 and how its predecessors were kinda mediocre PC games. But the Grand Theft Auto 3 rocketed the PS2 to success. We can see today that Monster Hunter was responsible for rocketing the PSP in Japan which is why Nintendo jumped on it for an exclusive.
Some of the shown quotes about the Gamecube’s failure are hilarious. Such as this:
Satoru Iwata says poor GameCube performance in Australia is because he needs to learn more about Australia.
“First of all, I am most sorry that the Gamecube’s performance is bad in Australia among any area in the world. One of the biggest things I feel unfortunate about is that I have not been to Australia. I am looking forward to learning more about Australia.”
Reggie says Nintendo thought portability in a console would be a huge selling point — but it wasn’t.
“With GameCube, at the time, portability was thought to be a big factor – that’s why it has a handle. Obviously, that wasn’t the case.”
