3 ms·

And fostering a culture at the upper echelons of management that enables, encourages, and embraces that mentality - that's the magic. Decades of fun goofy shit,

• bitwize 5y ago
  Nintendo also has a culture of sharing institutional knowledge regarding game design. Shigeru Miyamoto is not very involved in the day to day of Mario and Zelda development anymore. Other designers and producers who have worked with and learned from him have taken the reins of those franchises and taken them to new heights. Contrast that with, say, Sega, who never found their footing with the Sonic franchise ever since the late 90s. Sonic games were developed by whatever developers happened to be available -- sometimes American or mixed Japanese-American teams; and the design ideas from the first few games that made them so great were lost once new hardware generations came along that couldn't use the original engine code. Sonic went a whole console generation (fifth generation, Saturn era) without a new full game in the main series, and the games featuring him after that have been a real mixed bag. (No, Adventure 2 is a mess. The controls are some of the most slippery imprecise shit in the 6th generation.)