Bloomberg has published an insightful interview with former Nintendo developer, Ken Watanabe during which he touches on a number of things, but one aspect of certain interest is Nintendo’s secretive culture. We have already know that the company only hire the best developers who are often expected to take their own intuitive with game development. Company employees often work on things in secret during down time behind the scenes and some of these projects are then turned into full scale games.
“The company culture, or whatever you’d call it, embraces people taking initiative,” Watanabe, now an independent game creator, said. “For example, it’s not unusual for someone to secretly work on something without telling their boss — like, ‘I made this in secret’ — and then it turns out to be interesting, so it gets turned into a real product.”
One particle-effect artist spent all his spare time tinkering with Nintendo’s stage editor and eventually got reassigned to do the work that drew his interest. Watanabe himself secretly built a level for Pikmin 3 that was good enough to be adopted in the final game. “In that sense, there really is a lot of freedom,” he said.
“Whether it turns out to be a blockbuster or a huge flop, the company lets you just focus on building what you believe to be fun, without distraction,” Imamura said.
All the DEI initiatives are going to be peepee hurt that Nintendo doesn’t do DEI hires and actually hires based on merit/excellence. I’m not surprised some of these devs make secret projects which turn into actual projects. More companies should just hire the best devs not just to fill a quota otherwise we get games like Concord and Dragon Age The Veilguard.
Exactly. Keep it real Nintendo.
I doubt there’s DEI stuff in Japan. Japanese companies are hiring Japanese people because that’s just what the employment pool is full of.
Creative Freedom creates new ideas and fun concepts? Who would have thought? I think 80% of the triple A industry forgot about this
I’ll make a fun Nintendo game behind their back and then they’ll publish it. Maybe make a Donkey Kong game where he’s trapped in a cube and you have to slide him around the stage to collect bananas.
All of this sounds great, but… their recent doubling down on anti-consumer policies has soured the company for me.
If you asked me a year ago how I felt about Nintendo, I would have said they are my favorite and the best in the industry. The gold standard.
But now… The cracks began to show with the Switch 2 and only continue to grow with the game key card issue, game prices, etc. the greed is unbelievable.
It’s funny to me how people like you just cherry pick Nintendo for this kind of stuff. If you really analyze the current state of the industry, Nintendo is far from being “anti consumer” when compared to the likes of Microsoft, who literally just wants people to adopt the gamepass format where you own nothing, which also just allows them to constantly get a hand wave from their moronic fans when 99% of what they publish is complete junk.
Every acquisition and decision they’ve made has been horrible for the industry and for consumers. You guys are just too blind and naive to see it.
Btw, Key Cards aren’t even a new concept, there are quite a few Switch 1 games (as well as PS5 and tons of xbox games) that are just key cards/discs. All Nintendo did is attach a branding to it to make consumers aware of what they’re purchasing. That’s the opposite of anti consumer, you complete dingus.