This and more revealed in an interesting conversation between Nintendo's president and Earthbound's developer.
Earlier this year, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata and famous Japanese essayist/game designer Shigesato Itoi sat down for dinner. Itoi recorded the conversation, and has recently posted it on his website in 11 installments. While the talk mainly centered on the philosophical, there were some topics discussed that might interest Nintendo fans. Here are some highlights:
-- The two discuss Shigeru Miyamoto and praise his philosophy on game design and team management. According to Iwata, there are many problems that arise when working on a project. Miyamoto's style as a designer revolves around finding a single ingenious solution that solves multiple problems at once. He looks for "one single inspiration that makes so many things work. That's what you call a 'great idea', and finding that moves things forward, moves it towards the goal. Mr. Miyamoto thinks that it's the game director's task to find those."
-- Iwata, again on Miyamoto: "The majority of people think he's the person of art, full of inspiration, with a natural talent coming up with ideas one after another, as if he was guided by God." However, in reality, "he's extremely logical, but that's not all. He creates a mixture of left-prefrontal-oriented elaborate logic, and dramatic ideas that people are blown away by. To be honest, I have to say I envy this."
-- Itoi, on developing the Earthbound series: "When the MOTHER 2 (EarthBound) project was about to fall apart, you (Iwata) came in to help, and this is what you said to us: 'It will take two years to fix this keeping what you have built up. If we start from scratch, it will take only a year. What do you say?' We decided to start from scratch."
-- Iwata says there are no immediate plans for a WiiSports 2, as making it would be doing the obvious, easy thing. He feels his mission is to surprise people in a good way. Of course the luxury of success allows Nintendo to operate this way. "Realistically, I think we can say 'we won't do the easy' because we are currently making profit," said Iwata.
The entire chat between Iwata and Itoi can be found here.
