Hisashi Nogami

Producer, Splatoon 2

How did you break into game development? I originally joined Nintendo as a graphic designer for games. At the time, there wasn’t a department just for debug, and so debugging was done within the department, with new entries to the company being pulled straight in to help. For the first half year after joining I had no graphic design work to do and instead I just worked on debug! Splatoon was the first game to emerge from Nintendo’s Garage initiative. Can you tell us more about the setup of Garage? Garage isn’t so much the name of an initiative of a few staff members as it is a team name. The staff on the Garage team were developers who worked on Wii U launch titles like Nintendo Land and New Super Mario

Bros U. It happened that several teams were disbanded at the same time and around 10 people from these teams were appointed to form a team to propose new games.

We held discussions among ourselves while planning and prototyping many different ideas. After several presentations, the idea we decided to officially develop with a view to turning into a product became the basis for Splatoon.

The Garage members at the time were almost all brought into the development team for Splatoon once it became an official project, so the Garage team itself was disbanded. However, even if there isn’t a ‘Garage’ anymore, at Nintendo we’re constantly searching for new game ideas, and sometimes these ideas produce new products. One example of this would be Animal

Crossing, which Mr Eguchi and I developed over 15 years ago, while another game that came out of this same process is Arms. You’ve been with Nintendo for over 20 years, which makes you best equipped to answer the biggest question. What’s Shigeru Miyamoto really like to work with? While Mr Miyamoto is affable and cheery, he’s very strict when it comes to the job of creating games. If the idea you’re presenting isn’t thought out well enough, he’s quick to pick up on it and point out anything that’s lacking. Before presenting any idea to him, I would go over it again and again to ensure there wasn’t anything I had missed; no contradictions or oversights or the like. I feel he’s teaching us how important deep reflection is for game developers. While it’s not exactly a ‘true’ shooter, prior to

Splatoon, Nintendo didn’t have much experience with the genre. How hard was it to turn the concept into a reality? And what were the most valuable lessons you learned about how that style of game should be made? We didn’t aim to create a shooter title. We simply ended up with the current style after we combined Nintendostyle action with the concept of a competitive areacontrol game.

Nintendo has created other competitive games before and the Splatoon staff also usually play a variety of different competitive games too, so we do understand their appeal.

What we were aiming for was to create a competitive game that would be easy for novices to get into, while at the same time also providing enough of a challenge even if you play it over and over again. To achieve this, we felt that, firstly, we had to make sure we played the game a lot ourselves; and secondly, we also needed to follow up on how users were playing after release and add in changes. I feel this approach has produced some positive results. Splatoon was the first Nintendo game to be supported by a steady flow of free, post-release updates. How much of a cultural shift was that for a company like Nintendo, for whom even packaged DLC has been a rarity? While Splatoon is a game with some elements like those in shooters, it also has a new kind of game logic where you win or turn the flow of a match to your advantage by inking over the ground and walls. That was really new. So, we were concerned that we might confuse players if we suddenly offered them lots of weapons and stage variations, and instead we decided to add content bit by bit as players became more seasoned.

By adding new weapons and stages we change the whole battle dynamic, too, and our intention with this was to keep players engaged and coming back. This wasn’t a big decision for Nintendo, and I don’t think it’s the first example of us doing this either. It’s simply that it was what we needed to do for Splatoon, and so that’s why we went for it. It’s very much a family game. While its appeal to a younger generation is obvious, Splatoon is also enjoyed by plenty of veteran shooter players. Why do you think that is?

We don’t develop games to target only a specific user group. We’re making games that can be enjoyed by as many people as possible. We’re gamers too and usually play a variety of games. We aimed to build a competitive game that we’d enjoy, so perhaps it’s this that those users appreciate. It’s been especially popular in Japan. Why is that, do you think? There have been a lot of Splatoon teams that formed in Japan’s user community. I feel this is one reason why

Splatoon has been enjoyed for so long by so many people; these teams have battled against each other, competed to see who is best and have deepened the communication and interactions between users in doing so.

For users to more easily and more broadly achieve this, Splatoon 2 includes new elements to enjoy the game as a team, such as league matches and team participation in Splatfests.

There are a lot of teams in Europe and America too and it would make me very happy to see even more interaction between teams and further activity in the community. How surprised have you been at Splatoon’s success? More to the point, how surprised have your bosses been? When we completed the game, I was sure we’d made something interesting, but I had no idea that we’d be supported by as many players as we are! Being surrounded by players from all over the world at the 2017 Splatoon 2 World Inkling Invitational held at this year’s E3 was a precious and moving experience for me. What’s the most important thing you’ve learned during your time at Nintendo? The most valuable things I’ve learned are to try and see things from the perspective of someone playing the game, and the importance of continuing to think things over until I’ve come up with an answer I’m satisfied with.

“I was sure we’d made something interesting, but I had no idea that we’d be supported by as many players as we are”