Nintendo at 130: 'It’s on us to create that wow moment for players'
In the century and a bit since its founding in 1889, Nintendo has made playing cards, designed toys, hired out taxis and briefly run love hotels, but it is the last 40 years or so that have made it a cultural icon. Having dabbled in the video games business throughout the 1970s, in the 1980s Nintendo released the Game & Watch and the Nintendo Entertainment System, and since then it has introduced hundreds of millions of people to the joy of video games – from 90s kids squinting at monochrome Game Boys to grandmothers bowling on the Wii.
Nintendo’s hallmarks are innovation and an unwavering focus on fun. Where other big players in the games industry have chased the latest technology and positioned their consoles as entertainment hubs, Nintendo has mostly come out with affordable, family-friendly machines that combine technical innovations such as the Wii’s motion control or the DS’s touchscreen with fun, accessible games in the vein of Mario, Zelda, Pokémon and Wii Sports. Nintendo hasn’t always been at the top of the sales charts, but no other video game creator has proven so enduringly popular across generations. A lot has changed since 1985, but kids still know who Mario is.
The company is based in Kyoto, Kansai, a region of Japan known for its sense of humour. All art is a product of culture, and it’s not difficult to see elements of Kansai culture in Nintendo’s fun-centric philosophy. “In Kansai, we make much of laughter,” says Shinya Takahashi, a 20-year Nintendo veteran who currently oversees the Nintendo Switch. “I hope that we can bring laughter to others through our games.
“We are now living in the age of the internet and social media, so whenever we release a new game or console, we can get a read on people’s reactions immediately – but in the past we could not,” he reminisces. “What we used to do was look at people’s faces while they are playing. When I was younger, when the games I was involved with were eventually released, I would go to some of the toy stores and sneak a look at people’s faces while they played. If people looked surprised or happy, if they laughed, I’d think: yes, we did it!”
Nintendo is currently at a high point in its fortunes. Its latest console, the Switch, was released in March 2017 and is selling very well, after its 2012 predecessor, the Wii U, failed to find an audience and sent stock prices tumbling. It has been a relief for the company’s senior executives, not least Takahashi. “Before the Switch came out, it was very difficult to explain something unprecedented - a game console that you can play in your house and also carry around with you to play anywhere,” he says. “But after people started experiencing that, they started talking among themselves. That was when the Switch was flipped, so to speak.”
“It never gets any easier,” laughs Hisashi Nogami, who has lived through several risky Nintendo launches since he joined the company in 1994, from the endearingly toy-like GameCube to the awkward-looking original Nintendo DS. “With anything new it’s the unknown, and people don’t like trying unknown things – they’re always going to be a bit hesitant.”
Takahashi recalls the moment when the prototype for a motion-controlled console that let people play games by waving a remote– the Wii – was first shown to Nintendo’s wider development team. “Even among our developers there are often doubts! When the Wii remote was first introduced as a concept, the reaction was: what is that? Is it real? Will it actually work? But once we’d all tried it, we were surprised and delighted by it, and that made us realise that it was going to work out. With the Nintendo Switch, we all knew the concept, but when we picked up the prototype for the first time and saw Mario Kart running perfectly on the smaller screen, we were flabbergasted. Even people who are well aware of the concept and design can’t always tell if something’s going to work.”
“It’s not good enough to put your idea into words; you have to give people a concrete example to show them how it works,” agrees Nogami. “It’s on us to create things that allow players to experience that ‘wow’ moment.”
Gaming has only recently become a cross-generational activity. People who grew up with video games in the 1980s and 90s now have families of their own, and smartphones have opened up video games to almost everyone. The most recent Pokémon game, Let’s Go Pikachu/Eevee, was designed with this fact in mind. It packs a powerful nostalgia punch for the Pokémon kids of the 90s, but is also accessible enough for today’s kids, and borrows some ideas from the wildly popular smartphone game Pokémon Go. In the same way that Nintendo games have now been enjoyed by generations of players, they are made by different generations of developers: Junichi Masuda, one of Pokémon’s original creators, now works alongside 30-year-old developers who once traded Pokémon cards in the playground.
Takahashi says that he has often been approached by newer Nintendo employees who enjoyed the games he worked on 10 or 15 years ago. “Not every younger employee is like, sir, I want to follow in your footsteps, please tell me what I should do – that’s never the case!” laughs Takahashi. “Right now, because people of different generations are now working together, they’re always coming up with different ideas about how best to provide a meaningful surprise to players. And I think our job is combining these different ideas to create brand new ways of entertaining people. If we notice that only the senior male employees are gathering together to discuss an idea, one of us will say: we need to get some different perspectives on this.”
“It’s not just about which generation they’ve grown up in, but what they’ve grown up with, where they come from, what are their interests,” adds Nogami. “The ideas that people come up with would be different if they’re really into sports, or loved reading books all the time. Somebody who’s grown up playing video games all their life will have different ideas to someone who has grown up with social media. What’s really great about working at Nintendo is that you have all these people from different generations and backgrounds sharing ideas.”
Currently, the average age of a Nintendo employee in Japan is 38 years, and the average length of service is 13.5 years. Unusually for a video game company (though not, perhaps, so un
usually for a Japanese company), Nintendo appears to be good at retaining its talent. Many of the designers behind some of its earliest successes – including Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of both Mario and Zelda – are still around.
Takahashi and Nogami joke that Miyamoto has become something of a mythical figure at Nintendo: listening to them, one imagines the revered designer popping up out of nowhere to pass judgement on game projects in progress. “He is not involved in the minute details of development, but does oversee entire projects and identifies major issues: this part is bad, this part is bad, THIS part is bad … ” laughs Takahashi. “If he says something’s good, it’s rare, and you know it is. He’s actually a shy person – even when he thinks something is well done, he would not often say that to someone directly.”
“I have never once been praised by Mr Miyamoto,” Nogami chimes in, deadpan.
“Perhaps not to your face, but behind your back he’s very pleased with you,” Takahashi laughs.
It is new generations of talent, rather than the old hands, that are now driving Nintendo’s fortunes. At the V&A’s recent Videogames: Design/Play/ Disrupt exhibition, the Nintendo game on display wasn’t Donkey Kong, Super Mario World, or some other relic of the game-maker’s distant past; it was Splatoon, a vivacious, colourful, familyfriendly shooter made by one of Nintendo’s youngest teams and produced by Hisashi Nogami. It is one of Nintendo’s most successful games in years.
“Some things have changed, others haven’t,” says Nogami, reflecting on his time with Nintendo. “For me, games are still a place where you can have fun. But the gaming generation has extended: it used to be just children, but now it’s a whole huge swathe of people. Seeing lots of generations playing and enjoying themselves, that’s the biggest thing that has changed for me … I don’t think that the general player knows just how much work goes into making a game, but then I also don’t think they necessarily need to know.”
“Thirty years ago, if we asked the question, ‘Do you play games?’, the answer might have been yes or no,” adds Takahashi. “Now, if we ask the same question, the great majority of people are going to say yes … We are trying to entertain [all] those people. Like a swan, we look elegant above the surface. But underneath the water, we might be paddling like crazy.”