A few months ago I wrote an article on De Programmatica Ipsum about Keza MacDonald’s awesome book “Super Nintendo: The Game-Changing Company That Unlocked the Power of Play”, and as I was reading the book I took some notes; here they go, in their entirety, and without any editing, and with the page numbers appended at the end of each for reference.
- Hard to make a “Corporation” entry about Nintendo, being a secretive company. And not catering particularly to developers per se.
- Overall theme: Nintendo is about connecting people
- Book structured around games and franchises
- All games are quite surreal. When you play them, we inhabit two worlds at once (page 46)
- Miyamoto: characters devised by programmer not an artist (page 42)
- Universal suing Nintendo over the name Donkey Kong (page 36)
- Homo ludens (page 8)
- Game impact in human society (pages 14 & 15)
- Shintoism (page 46)
- Also bottom page 64
- Developers vs management (page 47 bottom)
- Wii Sports best selling game ever, followed by Mario Kart 8 Deluxe for the 2017 Switch (page 51)
- 30 years of Super Mario 64
- “Older and younger developers together” (page 55 bottom)
- The people making Mario nowadays grew up playing Mario as kids (page 61)
- Also: Nintendo holds on to its staff for decades
- “Video games are…” (page 67)
- “Manzai Trio” (page 69)
- Music by Koji Kondo
- Dreams are a common theme in the Zelda series (page 74)
- Another religious reference: Link’s horse in Ocarina of Time is Epona, goddess of horses in Celtic mythology
- Company willing to take risks (page 87)
- Zelda as analogy of the story of game dev in the past 40 years (page 94)
- 4 R&D units (page 101)
- Samus Aran first female video game character, inspired by Alien’s Ripley (page 103)
- More on 112-113, comparison to other female characters
- “Designers didn’t need to know about tech” (page 104)
- Producer cried in relief when Super Metroid was ready (page 107)
- Chaotic collab with Retro in the USA (pages 110 & 111)
- “Tabloid scaremongering” about video games (122)
- Pokémon Go phenomenon in 2016 (123)
- Pokémon biggest franchise of all time (124)
- Pokémon == Pocket Monsters
- Horrid Time Magazine article about the creator of Pokémon (129)
- Pokémon Go crowd disasters (136)
- Kirby: literally unheard of in the western world, wildly popular in Japan (142)
- Song: Big in Japan by Alphaville
- Kirby was created by a Tokyo partner company, HAL. The CEO would become Nintendo CEO in 2002 (143)
- Quote in page 144
- Death in 2015
- Kirby’s chapter is more about Iwata
- HP-65
- Appetite for business books (147)
- Expanding game to everyone (152)
- “Unless you shock people, you’ll never gain new customers” (155)
- Iwata perspective of a coder (155) even as CEO
- Wii Sports was to the Wii what Tetris was to the Game Boy (169)
- Not every game has to be like an encyclopedia. Some are more like magazine or comics (Iwata, 171)
- Technology as a whole fells much less playful now than it did then (174)
- Animal Crossing and COVID (181)
- We are all, along with the developers, cocreators of a game (188) -> Borges?
- The spirit of communication of Animal Crossing rubbed off on the developers (193)
- Animal Crossing team is almost half women
- Change in public perspective on video games after the pandemic (198-199)
- Developers should always envision who will eventually play what they’re making, the place that the game might occupy in people’s actual lives. (199)
- Nintendo is first and foremost a toy maker (207)
- Designing software and hardware simultaneously (208)
- Business model compared to PlayStation (212)
- Wii U flop (215)
- Nobody sets out to make a game that isn’t fun (221)
- Core principles of every Nintendo game (223)
- Super Smash Bros in the height of 1990s moral panic over violence on video games (226)
- Sakurai’s tendinitis working on Smash Ultimate (233)
- Roger Caillois in 1958: paidia vs ludus (235)
- Video games in museums and covers of magazines: “defining cultural medium of the modern world” (242)
- Games are operas made out of bridges (242)
- Nintendo more agile than other companies (250)
- Nintendo pairs older and younger developers since always (250)
- Nintendo behaves in the opposite of “move fast and break things” (252,253)
- A company that expends more on protecting than on coming up with new ideas is doomed to failure (261)