GoldenEye 007 was one of the greatest games of the 90s, and revolutionised the idea of the first-person shooter on consoles – but Nintendo was hugely concerned about its depiction of violence, game director Martin Hollis has revealed.
In a fascinating talk at the GameCity festival in Nottingham, the veteran designer explained how Twycross-based developer Rare was determined to forge a creative partnership with the Japanese company. After several approaches, the studio was finally visited by Genyo Takeda, the director behind the Punch-Out!!titles. “He went back to his hotel room, and when he came back for more meetings the next day, Rare had made a new version of Punch-Out!! over night, using their Silicon Graphics workstations and featuring huge rendered sprites. I imagine it impressed him a great deal.” A development deal was duly offered.
After producing the fighting game Killer Instinct, Rare was then offered the chance to make a game based around the GoldenEye movie, or “Bond 17” as it was known at the time. “Tim Stamper told me to write a design document,” says Hollis. “So I went away and thought about it for a month and wrote a ten-page document. And then I was making GoldenEye.”
According to Hollis, the game was originally much more graphic in its depiction of violence. “Bond is a violent franchise and making that fit with Nintendo, which is very much family-friendly, was a challenge. For a while we had some gore, it was just a flipbook of about 40 textures, beautifully rendered gore that would explode out. When I saw it the first time, I thought it was awesome, it was a fountain of blood, like that moment in the Shining when the lift doors open. Then I thought, hmm, this might be a bit too much red.”
He went on to explain that, towards the end of development, the team received a fax from Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto, with a series of suggestions for the game. “One point was that there was too much close-up killing – he found it a bit too horrible. I don’t think I did anything with that input. The second point was, he felt the game was too tragic, with all the killing. He suggested that it might be nice if, at the end of the game, you got to shake hands with all your enemies in the hospital.”
Instead of this, Hollis added a credits sequence into the game, introducing all the characters, almost as though they were being portrayed by actors. “It was very filmic, and the key thing was, it underlined that this was artifice,” he explained. “The sequence told people that this was not real killing.”
Hollis also admitted that the team borrowed the idea of having multiple objectives on each level from Super Mario 64. “I studiously tried to learn what Nintendo was. I played [Zelda] Link to the Past from beginning to end – I got all the hearts and all but two of the quarter hearts. I could write a thousand pages about that game. Then Mario 64 came out during the development of GoldenEye and we were clearly influenced by that game. Ours was much more open as a result.”
Hollis spoke at length about his great admiration for Nintendo. “I value the idea – which I do see as quite strongly a Japanese idea – of respect to the player and trying to see into their mind and their life,” he said. “We have jargon for it nowadays: ‘user-centric design’. Nintendo thought about where the player would be when they played the game and who would be with them at the time.”
But it’s not just the players. Hollis argues that Nintendo also respects the creators, even when it might be financially detrimental. Apparently, Rare was asked if it would consider making a game based on the next James Bond film, but the studio turned it down. “I thought about this and was not sure I’d really want to,” said Hollis. “We had a small chat, three or four of us on the team. It was like, ‘No’. We sent the message back, ‘The answer is no. We don’t plan to make another Bond game from another Bond film’. And that was it.”
Years later, Hollis still seems surprised at how easily Nintendo accepted their refusal. “It must have grossed, I don’t know, $400m or something. You might’ve thought that on a commercial basis someone at Nintendo, even lower down or higher up or whatever, would’ve said, “Well, are you sure?”, but out of respect for the creator and the importance of the people who actually made the game, that was it.”
Instead of making another James Bond game, Hollis moved on to work on Perfect Dark, which he says was “definitely a spiritual sequel”. While he left Rare 14 months into the game’s development, he was there for the important decisions.
“I wanted to make a game that starred a woman. Partly it was Nikita, the film by Luc Besson, and also Dishonored, a 1930s movie starring a spy who was a woman, and a general sort of sensibility that I thought it would be interesting to have a woman be the centre of attention. We constructed this character, to the very best of our ability, to be the centrepiece of the game.”
Joanna Dark was born of the best intentions – even her name comes from Jeanne D’Arc, or Joan of Arc – but her game inevitably made less of an impression than GoldenEye. If there are people who think Joanna Dark was less interesting than her male predecessor, Hollis has an explanation: “It’s very tough in a first-person shooter to develop a personality or a backstory, and what Bond brings you is honestly a lot more. You hear the theme tune and you’re right there.”
Showing posts with label Nintendo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nintendo. Show all posts
Monday, October 26, 2015
Tuesday, September 29, 2015
Why only Nintendo understands handheld gaming
At the EGX video games festival in Birmingham, Shuhei Yoshida, president of Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios, took to the stage and essentially confirmed that there will not be a follow-up to the PlayStation Vita handheld console. “The climate is not healthy for now because of the huge dominance of mobile gaming,” he lamented.
But is this true?
When the smartphone started its inexorable rise as a gaming platform, thanks mostly to the launch of the iPhone in 2007, business pundits were leaping over each other to declare the imminent death of the specialist games console. Why would people pay hundreds of pounds for a dedicated games machine if they were effectively carrying one around in their pockets all day? And then the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One arrived, shifting tens of millions of units, selling faster than their predecessors and generally doing okay.
As for the handheld gaming sector, the area of gaming surely most at risk from mobile phones ... well, the Nintendo 3DS has now sold over 50m units, putting it within a whisker of the top ten best-selling games platforms of all time. It hasn’t done as well as the Nintendo DS, of course (150m sales), but then, the DS has been on sale for over a decade and the 3DS has only been out for four years – and it arrived in a very different, much more fragmented and diverse, market place. Unlike Vita, however, it ignored most of its competition – from internet-connected consoles, to smartphones and tablets – and did its own thing.
Doing its own thing is something Nintendo has always understood, and why it has utterly dominated the handheld gaming sector. There were certainly other companies vying for a portion of the market when portable electronic games first started appearing in the late seventies, but it was Nintendo – or more specifically legendary industrial designer Gunpei Yokoi – that realised form factor, price, battery life and cuteness were going to be the defining features of a successful product.
The Game & Watch games were super simple, based on very cheap LCD screens, but they looked lovely, they were sturdy and they were cheap. When the GameBoy arrived in 1989, its monochrome display looked out of step with the wondrous visuals of the 16bit console era, but again, the tech was inexpensive and sturdy, and the games (Tetris, Super Mario Land, et al) exploited the limitations in an entirely loveable way. The combination of portability and kawaii design sensibilities meant that people actively enjoyed taking these things around with them and showing them to others.
Nintendo knew almost instinctively that we would think of miniature games as endearing. There is just something about the reduced form factor that allows us to enjoy child-like experiences without feeling self-conscious. The industrial design legend Donald Norman talks about how humans project a series of expectations onto objects, and how designers need to understand these in order to make successful products. In short: we kind of want small things to be cute – and Nintendo gets that.
But Nintendo’s rivals have usually made the error of thinking that to compete with Nintendo they had to beat it in terms of technology. The Neo Geo Pocket and Bandai Wonderswan totally understood the appeal of cuteness, but they were largely restricted to the Japanese market. In terms of global competitors – from the Sega Game Gear, through the Atari Lynx to the PlayStation Portable and Vita – the philosophy has been “bringing the home console experience to your pocket”. Not only has that proved costly to the consumer in terms of retail price and battery life, it grates against what a lot of people want from a portable experience.
Sometimes, as a race, we allow ourselves to be loveable. It doesn’t happen much and we often have to express it in quite obtuse ways – through novelty socks, or action figure collections, or really liking Pixar movies. Portable games fit into this mode of thinking. The most successful handheld franchises – Pokemon, Animal Crossing, Cooking Mama, Professor Layton – they’re all reasonably complex experiences, but they’re also really, really cute. They fit the form factor – both physically and psychologically.
The PlayStation Portable wasn’t cute. Vita isn’t cute. Both tried to compete, in industrial design terms, with home consoles and with smartphones, dropping into an awkward aesthetic space between the two. When gamers first saw Ridge Racer on the Sony PSP they gasped in wonder – a true console experience on the go – but it turned out that not many people wanted that; not just because PSP was more expensive, but because (to a lot of people) it just felt weird to sit on a bus with this ostentatious piece of cold, sleek gaming technology.
The idea of the Vita as a mini PlayStation 3 or 4 has stifled the creativity of developers. Stunted compromised spin-offs of major console titles like Uncharted and Call of Duty have done very little except underline the differences between a home machine and a portable gadget. They didn’t work. It’s no coincidence that the most successful series on Sony’s handheld machines – Monster Hunter – is very much in the Nintendo mould of highly sociable titles with childlike collection systems.
Sony has tried to innovate in hardware terms with OLED screens, proprietary memory card formats, proprietary optical discs and strange touch pads underneath the display. But these have usually been ignored by developers and read by consumers as a way to gouge more money from them. The philosophy of the home console race cannot be applied to the portable market because the consumer mindset is totally different. Sony may have had more success if it had really, really pushed the product as a homebase for offbeat experiments and indie projects – there have certainly been plenty of those along the way. But the marketing attention was often elsewhere.
The GameBoy, the DS and the 3DS haven’t just dominated this sector because they got the basics right – battery life, cost and sturdiness – they dominated because Nintendo understands that small things are cute and that cuteness pervades the whole experience. This is exactly what’s going on in the smartphone sector with Candy Crush, Fruit Ninja and Angry Birds. Bringing a game like Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer into work or school is a very specific experience that has nothing to do with technology or gadgetry.
But is this true?
When the smartphone started its inexorable rise as a gaming platform, thanks mostly to the launch of the iPhone in 2007, business pundits were leaping over each other to declare the imminent death of the specialist games console. Why would people pay hundreds of pounds for a dedicated games machine if they were effectively carrying one around in their pockets all day? And then the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One arrived, shifting tens of millions of units, selling faster than their predecessors and generally doing okay.
As for the handheld gaming sector, the area of gaming surely most at risk from mobile phones ... well, the Nintendo 3DS has now sold over 50m units, putting it within a whisker of the top ten best-selling games platforms of all time. It hasn’t done as well as the Nintendo DS, of course (150m sales), but then, the DS has been on sale for over a decade and the 3DS has only been out for four years – and it arrived in a very different, much more fragmented and diverse, market place. Unlike Vita, however, it ignored most of its competition – from internet-connected consoles, to smartphones and tablets – and did its own thing.
Doing its own thing is something Nintendo has always understood, and why it has utterly dominated the handheld gaming sector. There were certainly other companies vying for a portion of the market when portable electronic games first started appearing in the late seventies, but it was Nintendo – or more specifically legendary industrial designer Gunpei Yokoi – that realised form factor, price, battery life and cuteness were going to be the defining features of a successful product.
The Game & Watch games were super simple, based on very cheap LCD screens, but they looked lovely, they were sturdy and they were cheap. When the GameBoy arrived in 1989, its monochrome display looked out of step with the wondrous visuals of the 16bit console era, but again, the tech was inexpensive and sturdy, and the games (Tetris, Super Mario Land, et al) exploited the limitations in an entirely loveable way. The combination of portability and kawaii design sensibilities meant that people actively enjoyed taking these things around with them and showing them to others.
Nintendo knew almost instinctively that we would think of miniature games as endearing. There is just something about the reduced form factor that allows us to enjoy child-like experiences without feeling self-conscious. The industrial design legend Donald Norman talks about how humans project a series of expectations onto objects, and how designers need to understand these in order to make successful products. In short: we kind of want small things to be cute – and Nintendo gets that.
But Nintendo’s rivals have usually made the error of thinking that to compete with Nintendo they had to beat it in terms of technology. The Neo Geo Pocket and Bandai Wonderswan totally understood the appeal of cuteness, but they were largely restricted to the Japanese market. In terms of global competitors – from the Sega Game Gear, through the Atari Lynx to the PlayStation Portable and Vita – the philosophy has been “bringing the home console experience to your pocket”. Not only has that proved costly to the consumer in terms of retail price and battery life, it grates against what a lot of people want from a portable experience.
Sometimes, as a race, we allow ourselves to be loveable. It doesn’t happen much and we often have to express it in quite obtuse ways – through novelty socks, or action figure collections, or really liking Pixar movies. Portable games fit into this mode of thinking. The most successful handheld franchises – Pokemon, Animal Crossing, Cooking Mama, Professor Layton – they’re all reasonably complex experiences, but they’re also really, really cute. They fit the form factor – both physically and psychologically.
The PlayStation Portable wasn’t cute. Vita isn’t cute. Both tried to compete, in industrial design terms, with home consoles and with smartphones, dropping into an awkward aesthetic space between the two. When gamers first saw Ridge Racer on the Sony PSP they gasped in wonder – a true console experience on the go – but it turned out that not many people wanted that; not just because PSP was more expensive, but because (to a lot of people) it just felt weird to sit on a bus with this ostentatious piece of cold, sleek gaming technology.
The idea of the Vita as a mini PlayStation 3 or 4 has stifled the creativity of developers. Stunted compromised spin-offs of major console titles like Uncharted and Call of Duty have done very little except underline the differences between a home machine and a portable gadget. They didn’t work. It’s no coincidence that the most successful series on Sony’s handheld machines – Monster Hunter – is very much in the Nintendo mould of highly sociable titles with childlike collection systems.
Sony has tried to innovate in hardware terms with OLED screens, proprietary memory card formats, proprietary optical discs and strange touch pads underneath the display. But these have usually been ignored by developers and read by consumers as a way to gouge more money from them. The philosophy of the home console race cannot be applied to the portable market because the consumer mindset is totally different. Sony may have had more success if it had really, really pushed the product as a homebase for offbeat experiments and indie projects – there have certainly been plenty of those along the way. But the marketing attention was often elsewhere.
The GameBoy, the DS and the 3DS haven’t just dominated this sector because they got the basics right – battery life, cost and sturdiness – they dominated because Nintendo understands that small things are cute and that cuteness pervades the whole experience. This is exactly what’s going on in the smartphone sector with Candy Crush, Fruit Ninja and Angry Birds. Bringing a game like Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer into work or school is a very specific experience that has nothing to do with technology or gadgetry.
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