He has access I don't have. He wears better suits than I do. He asks pretty good questions.
And he's better at running a large Japanese company (though, to be fair, I've never tried).
Could Satoru Iwata be one of the top people in the field of games journalism where I toil?
He's certainly conducted some great, insightful interviews with his own developers over the past year. Why should we let the fact that he's reporting on his own company disqualify him? I mean, it has been done before.
First he showed off his chops late in 2006 with a series of Wii hardware and game interviews.
Now he's doing his best Keighley-Croal impression with interviews he conducted with 10 developers of "Super Mario Galaxy." (This is one of the only places where you'll see Nintendo publicly highlight the contributions of people other than star designer Shigeru Miyamoto and a select few other top talents.)
I wrote about some of the best exchanges between Iwata and the "Galaxy" team in my MTVNews.com GameFile column today.
Iwata has asked good questions of the 10 ... "But I'm sure you had differences in opinion with Miyamoto-san from time to time, right?"
He's gotten them to reveal odd weaknesses, like this one from "Super Mario Galaxy" producer Takao Shimizu: "I'm the type that gets motion sickness from 3-D games." (And he laughed at Shimizu as a result.)
And he's opened things enough for his company to be criticized, as when he got Shimizu to reveal that "Mario Galaxy" is not the game Shimizu's team planned to make: "About two years ago, after we were finished developing 'Donkey Kong Jungle Beat' for the GameCube, we had some time to plan what our next game would be. I had suggested creating a new, original game on our own, but then Miyamoto-san said in a rather sad tone, 'I wish you could make a game with Nintendo characters.' "
There's more in the column, including a great story about how hard it was to make the music for the game..
Oh, and to all you doubters out there, here's Iwata on the value of co-op modes, specifically the "co-star" mode in "Super Mario Galaxy":
The Co-Star mode. Actually, the cooperative mode in a video game is something that I feel particularly strong about. Miyamoto-san was the one who made the original "Mario Brothers" game, so it seems like every time he worked on a new Mario game, he was thinking of new and fun ways to implement a simultaneous two player mode. But it just hasn't worked too well. That's what he had told me while I was working at HAL Laboratories. It was about the time that I was working on "Kirby’s Fun Pak" for the SNES. Back then, he told me "Kirby games move at a slower pace than Mario games, so I think they’re suited for two player co-operative gameplay". When I heard that, (Masahiro) Sakurai-kun and I wondered, "why does Miyamoto-san raise topics that he can't work out himself?" (laughs) Thinking about all the struggles we went through back then, making this game must have been quite a challenge.
See? See?
Comments