18 ms·

Yamauchi No.10 Family Office

946 points by cmod 5y ago

dejj 5y ago
First click reminded me of Summer Wars[1] (Japanese: サマーウォーズ) immediately! The music video[2] nicely retains the opening effect. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_Wars https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_Wars [2]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cZuj-uTvdYc https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cZuj-uTvdYc
- maxwelljoslyn 5y ago
  Thank you for reminding me what this movie is called. Saw it years ago and forgot.
- toyg 5y ago
  Thanks for the link, this looks awesome. I’m trying to catch up with the best anime in the period 2002-2018, and this just made the list.
  - ragazzina 5y ago
    You can't miss REDLINE (2009).
tomklein 5y ago
This is the level of creativity I needed this morning.
- rambojazz 5y ago
  Unfortunately at the great expenses of usability.
  - developer93 5y ago
    you can turn the crazy off in the menu & get the serious website
    - eh9 5y ago
      IDK if it’s intentional, but the background creates a moire pattern while scrolling. I found the flashing from it jarring.
bashwizard 5y ago
Reminds me of the type of websites I and a lot of people used to create in flash in the early 2000.
- yarcob 5y ago
  Except this website actually works and sound is default off and you can switch to a more accesible view :) Still, I kinda miss the creativity of the early web.
  - abraae 5y ago
    I mainly saw this style in large retailers wanting to deliver a cool experience to their customers and candidates. Difficult, fraught projects battling with flash and unrealistic customer expectations. Once live, never touched until entirely replaced by some new hotness.
  - fireattack 5y ago
    Sound is default on here (it does need some time to load, though).
ksec 5y ago
Attention: It nearly flipping fried my CPU. But awesome site. Tested On both Safari and Chrome on macOS. 100% CPU usage when scrolling. Edit: On WOW, from the comments I decide to try it on my iPhone 11. Ultra Smooth Rendering with Music ( which wasn't even playing on my Mac ). And my phone isn't even warm after a minutes of playing around. Amazing Which makes me wonder. Why?
- aikah 5y ago
  It was pretty smooth actually, and I'm on a Intel N5000 with 4 gigs of RAM. Not sure it uses WebGL or CSS, but the performances are rather good.
- thitcanh 5y ago
  It’s kinda ridiculous that this happens. It’s not like it’s graphic intensive. Why would it warm up any GPU of this decade?
  - bruce343434 5y ago
    the power of javascript
- pm90 5y ago
  Are you powering a large monitor? I would guess the graphics doesn’t scale well with screen size.
- fireattack 5y ago
  It must be something Mac specific. It runs very smoothly on Chrome + Windows with a dated computer.
  - ksec 5y ago
    Yes, interesting all the comments suggest it is Mac specific and not browser specific. Tested again on Firefox Mac, same thing. Very strange.
    - 5y ago
ChrisArchitect 5y ago
Just saw this before bed. Geezus. Bringing the early 2000s web design experience vibes. Website of the family of the founder of Nintendo. Of course it's like this. Ha
- Clewza313 5y ago
  Family office, as in the wealth managers responsible for the Nintendo family fortune: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_office https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_office Hiroshi Yamauchi (previous CEO) alone had a net worth of around $8 billion at peak: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshi_Yamauchi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshi_Yamauchi Which is why the CxOs are all ex-Goldman Sachs, Nomura, Deutsche, etc.
busymom0 5y ago
Within a few seconds of loading, Safari gave me a warning: “This webpage is using significant memory. Closing it may improve the responsiveness of your Mac.” Cool site still.
- jamiek88 5y ago
  And yet it worked perfectly on my iPad Pro. Can’t wait to get an M1 Mac.
  - furyg3 5y ago
    40-45% of one core on my M1 MBP, 20-40% GPU.
aikah 5y ago
It's nice and creative, and that's what matters, people remember these web experience, that's why Flash was popular back then, it was all about impact, when today, the great majority of websites slap the exact same (bootstrap/material) layout, the same typography, down to the same "allegra" illustrations and nobody remember any of these... But it's definitely not the craziest website I've ever seen.
- always_left 5y ago
  What would be one more crazy? Curious.
  - spicybright 5y ago
    Here's one of my favorites: https://www.cameronsworld.net/ https://www.cameronsworld.net/
  - kome 5y ago
    I think the most creative and intelligent designs I ever saw, they disappeared with flash.
  - sellyme 5y ago
    It's not the type of "crazy" you're looking for, but as far as craziest websites, Time Cube was a strong contender.
- dang 5y ago
  The submitted title was baitily editorialized. We've changed the title now. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26803737 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26803737
ChrisArchitect 5y ago
Craziest ever? Not really cmod ;) Update title to Yamauchi No.10 Family Office crazy website or something
- dang 5y ago
  We've changed the title now. Submitted title was "The Craziest Website You Ever Did See". It's a good submission (especially because it's not correlated with anything else! https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=can%27t%20predict%20sequence%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...) but: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - pomian 5y ago
    We realize why. But, I wonder what would make it a more attractive title, because it truly is worth seeing. Amazing! Indeed.
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      Across all submissions, HN has to push back against the escalation of all the various sites that are truly worth seeing to different subsets of readers. The goal is to help readers figure out whether they’re interested not to “one crazy trick” or “you won’t believe #7” them into clicking through.
    - npongratz 5y ago
      Just speaking for myself, but "Yamauchi No.10 Family Office" is a perfectly attractive title, and the intrigue of the title is the entire reason I clicked it. (And I'm glad I did!) I would have ignored it, hid it, and probably flagged the submission without looking at the site if I had seen "The Craziest Website You Ever Did See" or some other hyperbolic clickbait bullshit. The less marketing, the better.
- cmod 5y ago
raverbashing 5y ago
For those who don't know, a Family Office is "a privately held company that handles investment management and wealth management for a wealthy family, generally one with over $100 million in investable assets" (as per Wikipedia) relating to the Nintendo Founder family
- redis_mlc 5y ago
  Family offices are controversial at the moment in the US because they can be as large as a hedge fund, yet have no regulation. There was a recent meltdown at Archegos that cost institutions several billion dollars involving a family office: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-markets-blocktrades-regulation-an/analysis-archegos-meltdown-set-to-intensify-shadow-banking-regulatory-scrutiny-idUSKBN2BM33K https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-markets-blocktrades-r... They're also a good gig if you're a CPA and one of your clients becomes a whale, which means you can work that one account and don't need to service 1,000+ little accounts annually. (My CPA/EA got "difficult", so I dumped her and just do it myself now. Cheaper, faster and less headaches.)
fergie 5y ago
This ascetic was very hot around 2000-2001 in the design department at the big dotcom where I worked.
doersino 5y ago
Pretty, but 10 seconds of scrolling turned my phone into a space heater.
mgerullis 5y ago
That’s interesting, my 2015 MbP had glitchy sound, stutter and fans spun right up while my iPhone 7 deals just fine with it.
- neartheplain 5y ago
  My first-gen iPhone SE also renders/plays it smoothly.
- pomian 5y ago
  Android Moto g - website works great, no heat, no stutter. You can zoom in and watch the motion of the cubes. Is it random motion?
- tomglynch 5y ago
  Same. MBP mid 2014, chrome, very stuttery.
- vmception 5y ago
  What about Safari?
  - mgerullis 5y ago
    A tad better but still yanky. Not trying to discredit the incredible artwork though...
hermitsings 5y ago
Tech? How'd they make this?
- chrisco255 5y ago
  Im guessing WebGL or HTML Canvas + JavaScript.
- Benjamin_Dobell 5y ago
  It's WebGL. Doesn't look like any library/engine I'm familiar with, quite likely custom. If you're interested in more detail, you can run spector.JS on the site to capture the render calls of a frame.
  - Cthulhu_ 5y ago
    It's from Nintendo, wouldn't be surprised if they hired some of their creative team and developers to work on it.
- MoodyMoon 5y ago
  Text on the website is a combination of SVGs and real characters which are then transformed using CSS. Assets are from /assets/doodles.json which contains information on how they can displayed and animated on a canvas through WebGL using a custom engine from /assets/js/engine.min.js.
ForOldHack 5y ago
Wow! New home page. OMG. When will they make this a minecraft plug-in viewer. ( I saw Godzilla! )
chrisco255 5y ago
Besides being a beautiful website, I was rather touched by their call to action: "Seeking stability only clouds your soul. Fear of failing only kills the seeds of innovation. We must create a more exciting future where people feel free to dream and leap into a world of possibilities. We must create a freer future where people are eager to truly live." It's hard not to love Nintendo. Also TLDR for those that didn't scroll through the whole thing, this family wants to use their wealth to fund business ventures in Japan. For those unfamiliar, Japan has had a so-called "Great Stagnation" since the 90s. Population has declined, GDP growth is slow and puttering, and some are saying that Japan has lost the edge it had in the 80s. This sounds like the Yamauchi family's attempt to bootstrap and create an ecosystem of ventures to reinvigorate entrepreneurship in Japan and their way of giving back.
- hnlmorg 5y ago
  I love Nintendo as much as the next guy but they're hypocrites when they come to comments like the above because they're second only to Disney with regards to how aggressively they chase after their IP. So many fun indie projects have been taken down because of Nintendo. And we're not even talking about commercial games but stuff kids have thrown together as tribute to Nintendo and have put online. YouTube reviews, Twitch streams, etc all need prior agreement from Nintendo otherwise they'll come after you (and if you're lucky, they'll just take a share of your advertising revenue). Nintendo have a massive fan base but they sure don't allow those fans to get creative. Sega, by contrast, are the complete opposite and not only allow fan projects to exists but even allow them to operate commercially on a small scale. edit: this comment is generating a lot more interest than I'd expected from my throwaway remarks and as a result a lot of the replies have missed the point of what I was complaining about. So I'll take some time now to expand on them a little more: - this isn't just a "Japanese thing", Nintendo of America are just as bad. They issue hundreds of DMCA takedowns. - this isn't a typical gaming thing either. I'm not going to pretend that all other companies are angelic but Nintendo seem uniquely proactive with chasing after their fan base even when those fans are just recording themselves playing games. Which leads me onto my 3rd point: - Nintendo are not just trying to protect their IP. Nintendo offer a partner program that costs to be a part of and if you're not on there than your YouTube and Twitch channels can get DMCA'ed if they feature Nintendo games. Even retro gamers playing titles released 30+ years ago have been targeted. So this is often less about protecting IP and more about profiting on retro gamers hobby channels. Nintendo's actions with the rest of the gaming community is quite unlike anything other gaming studios do. And I say this as someone actively involved in the retro gaming and streaming community. So many of my friends have ended up putting all of Nintendo's first party games on a "no play list" for their Twitch channels because of this. They've never had an issue with any other studio and they certainly don't run their channels for profit either (very few retro games on Twitch make money from their hobby). It's also hard to see how someone streaming a play through of a Nintendo game harms Nintendo as a company or their IP. And to be clear, I do still like Nintendo in the general sense. I might not agree with how they treat their fans (particularly the retro gamers, streamers, reviewers on YT) but I do still enjoy their games. I just know better than to stream myself playing them. I guess that makes me a little hypocritical too.... :)
mgerullis 5y ago
From a frontend devs perspective this actually is pretty crazy. I was going through the markup for 5 minutes and could barely tell what is what and how stuff is rendered. Chapeau!
- gervwyk 5y ago
  Same here. Although digging in a bit there is some really cool css tricks in here. Any idea who the developer is?
  - mgerullis 5y ago
    Sadly no. What I do however found interesting was the client-side redirect to https as well as the usage of jQuery. And the fact that a lot of text is in SVG
  - prawn 5y ago
    Mount Inc: https://twitter.com/mount_inc/status/1381805222679379969 https://twitter.com/mount_inc/status/1381805222679379969
- datagram 5y ago
  As far as I can tell the markup is just there for accessibility reasons, and all the visuals are being rendered via WebGL in the two <canvas> elements at the end of the page.
- anonu 5y ago
  Was hoping to see a bit more discussion on the tech on HN...
entropyie 5y ago
As I face into another day of tedious Jira wrangling, this really lifted my spirits! The music really makes the difference. I was also struck by the quote regarding stability and innovation. FWIW, very little CPU overhead on ThinkPad X280 with FireFox.
- pm90 5y ago
  It comforts me to know that I’m not the only one who feels this way about their work- “tedious JIRA wrangling”. Ugh, I empathize deeply with that statement.
nperez 5y ago
I got into programming for the fun of it, and it's become easier and easier to forget that as it's become more of a job. This was a much needed reminder! No doubt this must have been a joy to build
rorykoehler 5y ago
Clicking "Enter" doesn't work for me on MacOS on Firefox. Google Tag Manager is the only script that is being blocked though disabling (loaded more google stuff and) it didn't help.
- wst_ 5y ago
  Works fine for me on the same setup.
jbverschoor 5y ago
Damn catchy song!
cmod 5y ago
For those interested, dev agency is Mount Inc. [0] Some behinds the scenes production stuff on their Twitter feed. [1] [0]: https://mount.jp/ https://mount.jp/ [1]: https://twitter.com/mount_inc/status/1381805222679379969 https://twitter.com/mount_inc/status/1381805222679379969
- hkmurakami 5y ago
  From the web studio on a separate tweet thread: "a little bit of behind the scenes We build a custom modeling and layout/placement tool. We use the modeling tool to build the object models and the animations. The animations are build pixel by pixel and frame by frame, then placed using the layout tool. 274 original model objects " https://mobile.twitter.com/mount_inc/status/1381892567457882113 https://mobile.twitter.com/mount_inc/status/1381892567457882...
- throwaway2037 5y ago
  Genuinely curious: How did you figure it out?
  - hkmurakami 5y ago
    It went a little viral in Japan Twitterverse.
- robenkleene 5y ago
  The Yamauchi reminds me of Bruno Simon's personal site (https://bruno-simon.com/ https://bruno-simon.com/), who coincidentally has a (paid) Three.js course (https://threejs-journey.xyz/ https://threejs-journey.xyz/). Might interesting for people interested it learning how to make these kinds of things.
  - rchaud 5y ago
    That Bruno website is the first thing I thought of when I saw the isometric design. Gotta say, Bruno did it right. I expected to be able to drive my little car around the website to read about the family's vision for the future!
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
sublimefire 5y ago
Not sure about anyone of you but in my case the experience is terrible. Initial load 3.7 secs, then additional assets were downloaded +7secs. And this all just to show the button "Enter" which was unresponsive. After waiting for a couple more seconds background appeared. At this point I've spent 10 seconds on a site. FYI I'm on 16'mbp so there is more than enough processing power. Maybe it is because of 11MB the website needs for the button to start working (delivered via 114 requests), but on the other hand my network throughput is around 100mb. edit: Network monitor says that each of png tiles (~300B) took 11sec on average to receive. edit: Still can reproduce this but the loading time fluctuates 3-11secs. I'm on FFv87. Maybe I'm too far from the CDN server.
- nabakin 5y ago
  On my phone, loading the website is instant, loading the button to enter takes 2 seconds or less, and actually entering the scene is instant.
- drcongo 5y ago
  16"MBP here too, in Safari - it was surprisingly fast for me.
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  I'm on Android running the latest beta of Firefox and after an initial black screen for a second or two, the website operates quite smoothly. I have seen quite a few comments from people on Macbooks that have a terrible experience with the website, though, so maybe the problem is related to that? It could be that the GPU isn't great at rendering the specific code path this website hits, or that the network card hits some kind of edge case with the way this website deals with its assets, or something entirely different. It could also just be that the richer dev crowd generally buys Macbooks and the numbers are overstated, of course.
  - foxhop 5y ago
    I also had a good user experience on Android and Firefox.
- 5y ago
bruce343434 5y ago
What is the song called? I checked the networking inspector, but it didn't show anything. It seems "engine.js" is making xhttp requests and building an audio buffer - but it's all obfuscated. This shit is stuck in my head now, and I need an offline version of it.
- curiousgal 5y ago
  https://y-n10.com/assets/sound/bgm.mp3 https://y-n10.com/assets/sound/bgm.mp3
- aasasd 5y ago
  It's similar in spirit and sound to Space Ponch, who are also Japanese: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8maoqr4E5k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8maoqr4E5k (But doesn't seem to be related.)
glandium 5y ago
Pixelated Kanjis in isometric 3d are really hard to read. Thankfully the English text is not pixelated.
romanovcode 5y ago
Nothing happens when I click "Enter ->".
monkeydust 5y ago
Love it. If i ever get enough wealth to setup a family office I would want it to be as crazy/fun as this. Kudos for having the ability to toggle from crazy to normal views also.
a94d5dc743 5y ago
What a load of corporate-speak bullcrap in a geek-attractive wrapper!
xtiansimon 5y ago
“ If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” It’s like the 1990s all over again
throwaway2037 5y ago
"The Web is dead. Long live the Web!" This website is so magical. It gives me a child-like feeling of true discovery. The first website I ever visited was SGI.com. I saw it advertised in a computer magazine, but I didn't have access to the Internet. By chance, a few months later, I learned the central branch of my city library had one PC with dial-up. You had to reserve it. The waiting list was long. I still remember staring at the blank grey browser window, carefully pecking "www.sgi.com" into the location bar. Then... waiting, and waiting, and waiting(!) for all the graphics to load. SGI's homepage was full of these beautiful pre-rendered three-dimensional graphics. It was worth the wait!
onlyfortoday2 5y ago
horrible website
intrasight 5y ago
I get a blank page. Uses Flash?
Nazzareno 5y ago
Mobile version is even better, with a fantastic background music (any guess on which is the song? Can't shazam it)
- mzs 5y ago
  No tags in the MP3, likely created for the site but I too wish I knew the artist(s): https://y-n10.com/assets/sound/bgm.mp3 https://y-n10.com/assets/sound/bgm.mp3 edit: 吉田健二 Kenji Yoshida selected works: http://dajistudio.com/ http://dajistudio.com/ https://twitter.com/mount_inc/status/1381805231479005186 https://twitter.com/mount_inc/status/1381805231479005186
- aasasd 5y ago
  The music is similar in spirit and sound to Space Ponch, who are also Japanese: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8maoqr4E5k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8maoqr4E5k
m1117 5y ago
Gorgeous website, but freezes my browser :/
mplanchard 5y ago
I know this is not a particularly useful comment, but I love this so much. The attention to detail is incredible, the art is lovely, the song is so nice. I love the sentiment in the statement and philosophy. It reminds of katamary damacy. The more I look at it, the more impressed I am. Re: the detail, occasionally, the little blocks will randomly run into each other. When they do, they roll /over/ each other! Re: performance, I've got no problems running it in FF on ubuntu.
- forgot-my-pw 5y ago
  It runs on my phone, very impressive!
offtop5 5y ago
Does anyone have any links to any of the projects they're funding right now. I'd love to see some small indie Japanese games
- astrange 5y ago
  I don't think they're funding games (that seems a little unambitious) but you can go to https://bitsummit.org/en/ https://bitsummit.org/en/.
ryanjodonnell 5y ago
This site is epic
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
asiachick 5y ago
Like most people here it's all just opinion. I'm happy someone is pushing for more innovation in Japan but ... there's huge issues (1) Japanese people generally only speak Japanese. That tends to limit their reach to Japan only. Sure there are exceptions, I'm just saying it adds a hurdle. It also adds a hurdle to importing people. (2) Japanese culture doesn't encourage sticking out. There's a reason one of the most famous Japanese sayings is "the nail that sticks out gets hammered down". Nearly ever part of Japanese is set against innovation. From the culture of "life time employment", the culture of "cram in high school for a college, party at college, arrive at job making $25k a year because you have no skills but company will train you, hired based on which school you went to". There's the "seniority issues where you're required to defer to anyone hired before you" (apparently that's even worse in Korea to the point my Korean friends say you can't ever truly be best friends with someone a few years old than you because you're required to treat them as your elder, not your peer). There's whole business legal issues where for all kinds of business transactions you're require to go to the local business administration office and have them print out officially stamped forms which you then submit it contracts etc..., You can add in the financial system here is not friendly to new ventures. I don't know where to point to how risk adverse things are here but I can point concretely for you to look at interest rates on savings accounts, certificate of deposit, etc to see it's vastly different than the USA. (3) Japanese culture for various reasons still produces a much smaller number of career women. If you thought the representation of women in STEM (or pick your career) was low in some country in the west, it's 2-3-4-5x worse here. I'm not going to blame any particular thing but it is the current culture all around. The point is their missing a large pool of talent (4) There's not much talent here. I don't mean that Japanese people are not talented, I mean rather it's impossible to hire talent. I have friends running companies and they can't find anyone even in Tokyo Metro (34 million people) and Osaka Metro (19 million people). Some of that is cultural, people don't switch jobs. Some of it is truly lack of talent (see education issue above), some of it is low salaries. Example: Top pay at Sony Japan for a software engineer is ~$70k. Most places pay much less. A few cash rich companies might pay more, (Cyber Agent, Mercari, are rumored to pay above $100k). (5) If software engineers are the leaders of most innovation now, maybe they aren't, but if they are, Japan's attitude about them is they must be 21 to 35 and they are just replaceable cogs. After 35 they must be managers or else they move into some other field. (6) Overtime is ridiculous
anonu 5y ago
Genuinely curious: Can someone provide some insight into how this was built. https://mobile.twitter.com/mount_inc/status/1381805222679379969 https://mobile.twitter.com/mount_inc/status/1381805222679379... There is this link from the development agency. However its a bit hard to understand. It feels like they built their own rendering engine and then coded the animation on top of it...
millsmob 5y ago
Did I just have a stroke?
nxpnsv 5y ago
Works beautifully on iPhone
stefandesu 5y ago
I didn't look at the submitter's name at first, but thought "someone must have read Craig's Twitter." Close enough.
worldmerge 5y ago
Wow, that's such a cool website!
AILove 5y ago
On their current trajectory, they will be an extinct race in about 50 years. Instead of being insular they should look outwards. Open up migration and stop being racial and maybe that will introduce some fresh ideas. You loose some but win in the long term.
- astrange 5y ago
  They already did that. Japan is easier to immigrate to than the US, but it's not necessarily attractive because wages are lower than Western countries. The reason you don't hear about it is everyone is years behind on Japan stereotypes, and they shut everyone out again for pandemic management. But the "98% of Japan is Japanese" quote is not true (it actually means 98% Japanese citizens).
a94d5dc743 5y ago
What a load of corporate-speak bullcrap in a geek-attractive wrapper!..
a94d5dc743 5y ago
What a load of corporate-speak bullcrap in a geek-attractive wrapper!...

946 points by cmod 5y ago

dejj 5y ago

First click reminded me of Summer Wars[1] (Japanese: サマーウォーズ) immediately! The music video[2] nicely retains the opening effect. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_Wars https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_Wars [2]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cZuj-uTvdYc https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cZuj-uTvdYc

maxwelljoslyn 5y ago
Thank you for reminding me what this movie is called. Saw it years ago and forgot.
toyg 5y ago
Thanks for the link, this looks awesome. I’m trying to catch up with the best anime in the period 2002-2018, and this just made the list.
- ragazzina 5y ago
  You can't miss REDLINE (2009).

tomklein 5y ago

This is the level of creativity I needed this morning.

rambojazz 5y ago
Unfortunately at the great expenses of usability.
- developer93 5y ago
  you can turn the crazy off in the menu & get the serious website
  - eh9 5y ago
    IDK if it’s intentional, but the background creates a moire pattern while scrolling. I found the flashing from it jarring.

bashwizard 5y ago

Reminds me of the type of websites I and a lot of people used to create in flash in the early 2000.

yarcob 5y ago
Except this website actually works and sound is default off and you can switch to a more accesible view :) Still, I kinda miss the creativity of the early web.
- abraae 5y ago
  I mainly saw this style in large retailers wanting to deliver a cool experience to their customers and candidates. Difficult, fraught projects battling with flash and unrealistic customer expectations. Once live, never touched until entirely replaced by some new hotness.
- fireattack 5y ago
  Sound is default on here (it does need some time to load, though).

ksec 5y ago

Attention: It nearly flipping fried my CPU. But awesome site. Tested On both Safari and Chrome on macOS. 100% CPU usage when scrolling. Edit: On WOW, from the comments I decide to try it on my iPhone 11. Ultra Smooth Rendering with Music ( which wasn't even playing on my Mac ). And my phone isn't even warm after a minutes of playing around. Amazing Which makes me wonder. Why?

aikah 5y ago
It was pretty smooth actually, and I'm on a Intel N5000 with 4 gigs of RAM. Not sure it uses WebGL or CSS, but the performances are rather good.
thitcanh 5y ago
It’s kinda ridiculous that this happens. It’s not like it’s graphic intensive. Why would it warm up any GPU of this decade?
- bruce343434 5y ago
  the power of javascript
pm90 5y ago
Are you powering a large monitor? I would guess the graphics doesn’t scale well with screen size.
fireattack 5y ago
It must be something Mac specific. It runs very smoothly on Chrome + Windows with a dated computer.
- ksec 5y ago
  Yes, interesting all the comments suggest it is Mac specific and not browser specific. Tested again on Firefox Mac, same thing. Very strange.
  - 5y ago

ChrisArchitect 5y ago

Just saw this before bed. Geezus. Bringing the early 2000s web design experience vibes. Website of the family of the founder of Nintendo. Of course it's like this. Ha

Clewza313 5y ago
Family office, as in the wealth managers responsible for the Nintendo family fortune: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_office https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_office Hiroshi Yamauchi (previous CEO) alone had a net worth of around $8 billion at peak: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshi_Yamauchi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshi_Yamauchi Which is why the CxOs are all ex-Goldman Sachs, Nomura, Deutsche, etc.

busymom0 5y ago

Within a few seconds of loading, Safari gave me a warning: “This webpage is using significant memory. Closing it may improve the responsiveness of your Mac.” Cool site still.

jamiek88 5y ago
And yet it worked perfectly on my iPad Pro. Can’t wait to get an M1 Mac.
- furyg3 5y ago
  40-45% of one core on my M1 MBP, 20-40% GPU.

aikah 5y ago

It's nice and creative, and that's what matters, people remember these web experience, that's why Flash was popular back then, it was all about impact, when today, the great majority of websites slap the exact same (bootstrap/material) layout, the same typography, down to the same "allegra" illustrations and nobody remember any of these... But it's definitely not the craziest website I've ever seen.

always_left 5y ago
What would be one more crazy? Curious.
- spicybright 5y ago
  Here's one of my favorites: https://www.cameronsworld.net/ https://www.cameronsworld.net/
- kome 5y ago
  I think the most creative and intelligent designs I ever saw, they disappeared with flash.
- sellyme 5y ago
  It's not the type of "crazy" you're looking for, but as far as craziest websites, Time Cube was a strong contender.
dang 5y ago
The submitted title was baitily editorialized. We've changed the title now. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26803737 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26803737

ChrisArchitect 5y ago

Craziest ever? Not really cmod ;) Update title to Yamauchi No.10 Family Office crazy website or something

dang 5y ago
We've changed the title now. Submitted title was "The Craziest Website You Ever Did See". It's a good submission (especially because it's not correlated with anything else! https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=can%27t%20predict%20sequence%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...) but: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- pomian 5y ago
  We realize why. But, I wonder what would make it a more attractive title, because it truly is worth seeing. Amazing! Indeed.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    Across all submissions, HN has to push back against the escalation of all the various sites that are truly worth seeing to different subsets of readers. The goal is to help readers figure out whether they’re interested not to “one crazy trick” or “you won’t believe #7” them into clicking through.
  - npongratz 5y ago
    Just speaking for myself, but "Yamauchi No.10 Family Office" is a perfectly attractive title, and the intrigue of the title is the entire reason I clicked it. (And I'm glad I did!) I would have ignored it, hid it, and probably flagged the submission without looking at the site if I had seen "The Craziest Website You Ever Did See" or some other hyperbolic clickbait bullshit. The less marketing, the better.
cmod 5y ago

raverbashing 5y ago

For those who don't know, a Family Office is "a privately held company that handles investment management and wealth management for a wealthy family, generally one with over $100 million in investable assets" (as per Wikipedia) relating to the Nintendo Founder family

redis_mlc 5y ago
Family offices are controversial at the moment in the US because they can be as large as a hedge fund, yet have no regulation. There was a recent meltdown at Archegos that cost institutions several billion dollars involving a family office: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-markets-blocktrades-regulation-an/analysis-archegos-meltdown-set-to-intensify-shadow-banking-regulatory-scrutiny-idUSKBN2BM33K https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-markets-blocktrades-r... They're also a good gig if you're a CPA and one of your clients becomes a whale, which means you can work that one account and don't need to service 1,000+ little accounts annually. (My CPA/EA got "difficult", so I dumped her and just do it myself now. Cheaper, faster and less headaches.)

fergie 5y ago

This ascetic was very hot around 2000-2001 in the design department at the big dotcom where I worked.

doersino 5y ago

Pretty, but 10 seconds of scrolling turned my phone into a space heater.

mgerullis 5y ago

That’s interesting, my 2015 MbP had glitchy sound, stutter and fans spun right up while my iPhone 7 deals just fine with it.

neartheplain 5y ago
My first-gen iPhone SE also renders/plays it smoothly.
pomian 5y ago
Android Moto g - website works great, no heat, no stutter. You can zoom in and watch the motion of the cubes. Is it random motion?
tomglynch 5y ago
Same. MBP mid 2014, chrome, very stuttery.
vmception 5y ago
What about Safari?
- mgerullis 5y ago
  A tad better but still yanky. Not trying to discredit the incredible artwork though...

hermitsings 5y ago

Tech? How'd they make this?

chrisco255 5y ago
Im guessing WebGL or HTML Canvas + JavaScript.
Benjamin_Dobell 5y ago
It's WebGL. Doesn't look like any library/engine I'm familiar with, quite likely custom. If you're interested in more detail, you can run spector.JS on the site to capture the render calls of a frame.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  It's from Nintendo, wouldn't be surprised if they hired some of their creative team and developers to work on it.
MoodyMoon 5y ago
Text on the website is a combination of SVGs and real characters which are then transformed using CSS. Assets are from /assets/doodles.json which contains information on how they can displayed and animated on a canvas through WebGL using a custom engine from /assets/js/engine.min.js.

ForOldHack 5y ago

Wow! New home page. OMG. When will they make this a minecraft plug-in viewer. ( I saw Godzilla! )

chrisco255 5y ago

Besides being a beautiful website, I was rather touched by their call to action: "Seeking stability only clouds your soul. Fear of failing only kills the seeds of innovation. We must create a more exciting future where people feel free to dream and leap into a world of possibilities. We must create a freer future where people are eager to truly live." It's hard not to love Nintendo. Also TLDR for those that didn't scroll through the whole thing, this family wants to use their wealth to fund business ventures in Japan. For those unfamiliar, Japan has had a so-called "Great Stagnation" since the 90s. Population has declined, GDP growth is slow and puttering, and some are saying that Japan has lost the edge it had in the 80s. This sounds like the Yamauchi family's attempt to bootstrap and create an ecosystem of ventures to reinvigorate entrepreneurship in Japan and their way of giving back.

hnlmorg 5y ago
I love Nintendo as much as the next guy but they're hypocrites when they come to comments like the above because they're second only to Disney with regards to how aggressively they chase after their IP. So many fun indie projects have been taken down because of Nintendo. And we're not even talking about commercial games but stuff kids have thrown together as tribute to Nintendo and have put online. YouTube reviews, Twitch streams, etc all need prior agreement from Nintendo otherwise they'll come after you (and if you're lucky, they'll just take a share of your advertising revenue). Nintendo have a massive fan base but they sure don't allow those fans to get creative. Sega, by contrast, are the complete opposite and not only allow fan projects to exists but even allow them to operate commercially on a small scale. edit: this comment is generating a lot more interest than I'd expected from my throwaway remarks and as a result a lot of the replies have missed the point of what I was complaining about. So I'll take some time now to expand on them a little more: - this isn't just a "Japanese thing", Nintendo of America are just as bad. They issue hundreds of DMCA takedowns. - this isn't a typical gaming thing either. I'm not going to pretend that all other companies are angelic but Nintendo seem uniquely proactive with chasing after their fan base even when those fans are just recording themselves playing games. Which leads me onto my 3rd point: - Nintendo are not just trying to protect their IP. Nintendo offer a partner program that costs to be a part of and if you're not on there than your YouTube and Twitch channels can get DMCA'ed if they feature Nintendo games. Even retro gamers playing titles released 30+ years ago have been targeted. So this is often less about protecting IP and more about profiting on retro gamers hobby channels. Nintendo's actions with the rest of the gaming community is quite unlike anything other gaming studios do. And I say this as someone actively involved in the retro gaming and streaming community. So many of my friends have ended up putting all of Nintendo's first party games on a "no play list" for their Twitch channels because of this. They've never had an issue with any other studio and they certainly don't run their channels for profit either (very few retro games on Twitch make money from their hobby). It's also hard to see how someone streaming a play through of a Nintendo game harms Nintendo as a company or their IP. And to be clear, I do still like Nintendo in the general sense. I might not agree with how they treat their fans (particularly the retro gamers, streamers, reviewers on YT) but I do still enjoy their games. I just know better than to stream myself playing them. I guess that makes me a little hypocritical too.... :)

mgerullis 5y ago

From a frontend devs perspective this actually is pretty crazy. I was going through the markup for 5 minutes and could barely tell what is what and how stuff is rendered. Chapeau!

gervwyk 5y ago
Same here. Although digging in a bit there is some really cool css tricks in here. Any idea who the developer is?
- mgerullis 5y ago
  Sadly no. What I do however found interesting was the client-side redirect to https as well as the usage of jQuery. And the fact that a lot of text is in SVG
- prawn 5y ago
  Mount Inc: https://twitter.com/mount_inc/status/1381805222679379969 https://twitter.com/mount_inc/status/1381805222679379969
datagram 5y ago
As far as I can tell the markup is just there for accessibility reasons, and all the visuals are being rendered via WebGL in the two <canvas> elements at the end of the page.
anonu 5y ago
Was hoping to see a bit more discussion on the tech on HN...

entropyie 5y ago

As I face into another day of tedious Jira wrangling, this really lifted my spirits! The music really makes the difference. I was also struck by the quote regarding stability and innovation. FWIW, very little CPU overhead on ThinkPad X280 with FireFox.

pm90 5y ago
It comforts me to know that I’m not the only one who feels this way about their work- “tedious JIRA wrangling”. Ugh, I empathize deeply with that statement.

nperez 5y ago

I got into programming for the fun of it, and it's become easier and easier to forget that as it's become more of a job. This was a much needed reminder! No doubt this must have been a joy to build

rorykoehler 5y ago

Clicking "Enter" doesn't work for me on MacOS on Firefox. Google Tag Manager is the only script that is being blocked though disabling (loaded more google stuff and) it didn't help.

wst_ 5y ago
Works fine for me on the same setup.

jbverschoor 5y ago

Damn catchy song!

cmod 5y ago

For those interested, dev agency is Mount Inc. [0] Some behinds the scenes production stuff on their Twitter feed. [1] [0]: https://mount.jp/ https://mount.jp/ [1]: https://twitter.com/mount_inc/status/1381805222679379969 https://twitter.com/mount_inc/status/1381805222679379969

hkmurakami 5y ago
From the web studio on a separate tweet thread: "a little bit of behind the scenes We build a custom modeling and layout/placement tool. We use the modeling tool to build the object models and the animations. The animations are build pixel by pixel and frame by frame, then placed using the layout tool. 274 original model objects " https://mobile.twitter.com/mount_inc/status/1381892567457882113 https://mobile.twitter.com/mount_inc/status/1381892567457882...
throwaway2037 5y ago
Genuinely curious: How did you figure it out?
- hkmurakami 5y ago
  It went a little viral in Japan Twitterverse.
robenkleene 5y ago
The Yamauchi reminds me of Bruno Simon's personal site (https://bruno-simon.com/ https://bruno-simon.com/), who coincidentally has a (paid) Three.js course (https://threejs-journey.xyz/ https://threejs-journey.xyz/). Might interesting for people interested it learning how to make these kinds of things.
- rchaud 5y ago
  That Bruno website is the first thing I thought of when I saw the isometric design. Gotta say, Bruno did it right. I expected to be able to drive my little car around the website to read about the family's vision for the future!

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

sublimefire 5y ago

Not sure about anyone of you but in my case the experience is terrible. Initial load 3.7 secs, then additional assets were downloaded +7secs. And this all just to show the button "Enter" which was unresponsive. After waiting for a couple more seconds background appeared. At this point I've spent 10 seconds on a site. FYI I'm on 16'mbp so there is more than enough processing power. Maybe it is because of 11MB the website needs for the button to start working (delivered via 114 requests), but on the other hand my network throughput is around 100mb. edit: Network monitor says that each of png tiles (~300B) took 11sec on average to receive. edit: Still can reproduce this but the loading time fluctuates 3-11secs. I'm on FFv87. Maybe I'm too far from the CDN server.

nabakin 5y ago
On my phone, loading the website is instant, loading the button to enter takes 2 seconds or less, and actually entering the scene is instant.
drcongo 5y ago
16"MBP here too, in Safari - it was surprisingly fast for me.
jeroenhd 5y ago
I'm on Android running the latest beta of Firefox and after an initial black screen for a second or two, the website operates quite smoothly. I have seen quite a few comments from people on Macbooks that have a terrible experience with the website, though, so maybe the problem is related to that? It could be that the GPU isn't great at rendering the specific code path this website hits, or that the network card hits some kind of edge case with the way this website deals with its assets, or something entirely different. It could also just be that the richer dev crowd generally buys Macbooks and the numbers are overstated, of course.
- foxhop 5y ago
  I also had a good user experience on Android and Firefox.
5y ago

bruce343434 5y ago

What is the song called? I checked the networking inspector, but it didn't show anything. It seems "engine.js" is making xhttp requests and building an audio buffer - but it's all obfuscated. This shit is stuck in my head now, and I need an offline version of it.

curiousgal 5y ago
https://y-n10.com/assets/sound/bgm.mp3 https://y-n10.com/assets/sound/bgm.mp3
aasasd 5y ago
It's similar in spirit and sound to Space Ponch, who are also Japanese: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8maoqr4E5k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8maoqr4E5k (But doesn't seem to be related.)

glandium 5y ago

Pixelated Kanjis in isometric 3d are really hard to read. Thankfully the English text is not pixelated.

romanovcode 5y ago

Nothing happens when I click "Enter ->".

monkeydust 5y ago

Love it. If i ever get enough wealth to setup a family office I would want it to be as crazy/fun as this. Kudos for having the ability to toggle from crazy to normal views also.

a94d5dc743 5y ago

What a load of corporate-speak bullcrap in a geek-attractive wrapper!

xtiansimon 5y ago

“ If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” It’s like the 1990s all over again

throwaway2037 5y ago

"The Web is dead. Long live the Web!" This website is so magical. It gives me a child-like feeling of true discovery. The first website I ever visited was SGI.com. I saw it advertised in a computer magazine, but I didn't have access to the Internet. By chance, a few months later, I learned the central branch of my city library had one PC with dial-up. You had to reserve it. The waiting list was long. I still remember staring at the blank grey browser window, carefully pecking "www.sgi.com" into the location bar. Then... waiting, and waiting, and waiting(!) for all the graphics to load. SGI's homepage was full of these beautiful pre-rendered three-dimensional graphics. It was worth the wait!

onlyfortoday2 5y ago

horrible website

intrasight 5y ago

I get a blank page. Uses Flash?

Nazzareno 5y ago

Mobile version is even better, with a fantastic background music (any guess on which is the song? Can't shazam it)

mzs 5y ago
No tags in the MP3, likely created for the site but I too wish I knew the artist(s): https://y-n10.com/assets/sound/bgm.mp3 https://y-n10.com/assets/sound/bgm.mp3 edit: 吉田健二 Kenji Yoshida selected works: http://dajistudio.com/ http://dajistudio.com/ https://twitter.com/mount_inc/status/1381805231479005186 https://twitter.com/mount_inc/status/1381805231479005186
aasasd 5y ago
The music is similar in spirit and sound to Space Ponch, who are also Japanese: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8maoqr4E5k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8maoqr4E5k

m1117 5y ago

Gorgeous website, but freezes my browser :/

mplanchard 5y ago

I know this is not a particularly useful comment, but I love this so much. The attention to detail is incredible, the art is lovely, the song is so nice. I love the sentiment in the statement and philosophy. It reminds of katamary damacy. The more I look at it, the more impressed I am. Re: the detail, occasionally, the little blocks will randomly run into each other. When they do, they roll /over/ each other! Re: performance, I've got no problems running it in FF on ubuntu.

forgot-my-pw 5y ago
It runs on my phone, very impressive!

offtop5 5y ago

Does anyone have any links to any of the projects they're funding right now. I'd love to see some small indie Japanese games

astrange 5y ago
I don't think they're funding games (that seems a little unambitious) but you can go to https://bitsummit.org/en/ https://bitsummit.org/en/.

ryanjodonnell 5y ago

This site is epic

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

asiachick 5y ago

Like most people here it's all just opinion. I'm happy someone is pushing for more innovation in Japan but ... there's huge issues (1) Japanese people generally only speak Japanese. That tends to limit their reach to Japan only. Sure there are exceptions, I'm just saying it adds a hurdle. It also adds a hurdle to importing people. (2) Japanese culture doesn't encourage sticking out. There's a reason one of the most famous Japanese sayings is "the nail that sticks out gets hammered down". Nearly ever part of Japanese is set against innovation. From the culture of "life time employment", the culture of "cram in high school for a college, party at college, arrive at job making $25k a year because you have no skills but company will train you, hired based on which school you went to". There's the "seniority issues where you're required to defer to anyone hired before you" (apparently that's even worse in Korea to the point my Korean friends say you can't ever truly be best friends with someone a few years old than you because you're required to treat them as your elder, not your peer). There's whole business legal issues where for all kinds of business transactions you're require to go to the local business administration office and have them print out officially stamped forms which you then submit it contracts etc..., You can add in the financial system here is not friendly to new ventures. I don't know where to point to how risk adverse things are here but I can point concretely for you to look at interest rates on savings accounts, certificate of deposit, etc to see it's vastly different than the USA. (3) Japanese culture for various reasons still produces a much smaller number of career women. If you thought the representation of women in STEM (or pick your career) was low in some country in the west, it's 2-3-4-5x worse here. I'm not going to blame any particular thing but it is the current culture all around. The point is their missing a large pool of talent (4) There's not much talent here. I don't mean that Japanese people are not talented, I mean rather it's impossible to hire talent. I have friends running companies and they can't find anyone even in Tokyo Metro (34 million people) and Osaka Metro (19 million people). Some of that is cultural, people don't switch jobs. Some of it is truly lack of talent (see education issue above), some of it is low salaries. Example: Top pay at Sony Japan for a software engineer is ~$70k. Most places pay much less. A few cash rich companies might pay more, (Cyber Agent, Mercari, are rumored to pay above $100k). (5) If software engineers are the leaders of most innovation now, maybe they aren't, but if they are, Japan's attitude about them is they must be 21 to 35 and they are just replaceable cogs. After 35 they must be managers or else they move into some other field. (6) Overtime is ridiculous

anonu 5y ago

Genuinely curious: Can someone provide some insight into how this was built. https://mobile.twitter.com/mount_inc/status/1381805222679379969 https://mobile.twitter.com/mount_inc/status/1381805222679379... There is this link from the development agency. However its a bit hard to understand. It feels like they built their own rendering engine and then coded the animation on top of it...

millsmob 5y ago

Did I just have a stroke?

nxpnsv 5y ago

Works beautifully on iPhone

stefandesu 5y ago

I didn't look at the submitter's name at first, but thought "someone must have read Craig's Twitter." Close enough.

worldmerge 5y ago

Wow, that's such a cool website!

AILove 5y ago

On their current trajectory, they will be an extinct race in about 50 years. Instead of being insular they should look outwards. Open up migration and stop being racial and maybe that will introduce some fresh ideas. You loose some but win in the long term.

astrange 5y ago
They already did that. Japan is easier to immigrate to than the US, but it's not necessarily attractive because wages are lower than Western countries. The reason you don't hear about it is everyone is years behind on Japan stereotypes, and they shut everyone out again for pandemic management. But the "98% of Japan is Japanese" quote is not true (it actually means 98% Japanese citizens).

a94d5dc743 5y ago

What a load of corporate-speak bullcrap in a geek-attractive wrapper!..

a94d5dc743 5y ago

What a load of corporate-speak bullcrap in a geek-attractive wrapper!...