Small Read on Nintendo Development

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“The thinking that guides us is: what can we do to pleasantly surprise players? It’s not that we’re consciously trying to innovate; we’re trying to find ways to make people happy. The result is that we come up with things other people have not done.”

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“In many cases, we begin by assigning a small group to a project; not necessarily senior staff, but developers, to try and come up with ideas. Those lead to the end product. Super Mario Odyssey is a good example to explain this: we actually had several small groups and as a result we had many different ideas, which we then put together to make a single product. Naturally during the course of early development, we find the right mission for each project. I believe every game has a different mission. With [Nintendo Switch launch game] 1-2 Switch, for example, the mission was to make a party game where players would not have to look at the screen – where people would face each other.”

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“We have the software team and the hardware team working very closely together,” elaborates Takahashi. “From the hardware perspective, they will sometimes come to the software group and say, ‘We have this particular chipset that we’re thinking about using in our next system, can you take advantage of this?’ But sometimes, the software team goes to hardware team and says, ‘We’re working with this theme, can you look into the technical possibilities, and see if you can come up with hardware features to accommodate it?’

“This is the advantage we have at Nintendo as a software/hardware integrated organisation – when we do research for our new hardware systems, our software developers, our artists, our programmers and our hardware engineers all get together and decide what we should aim for. We’ve been doing that for many years.”

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