Shigeru Miyamoto - He who needs no introduction

How Nintendo creates fun and lasting video games is not really a big secret.  It’s hidden in plain sight.  A lot of people like focusing on the “genius” of Shigeru Miyamoto as a game designer – maybe even as some kind of gaming “god” -  but very few focus on his method.

From an article reporting the development methods of Nintendo at GDC ‘09:

[Miyamoto] does a prototype phase for each game that has terrible graphics. We got to see the prototype for Wii Boxing, which had just colored boxes for graphics. This prototype phase has only very few team members (maybe 2 or 3) and ONLY focuses on the interaction. “Find the fun.” There is a lot of trial and error as they look for this fun.

And from an interview from Clinton Keith of High Moon Studios’ (in an article on Lost Garden) nearly 2 years ago:

“If you want someone to fail, you want them to fail fast, before they spend a lot of money. That’s how Nintendo was. When I was working on the Dream Team [at Angel Studios], they wanted us to do this DNA-based driving game called Buggy Boogie. You had these vehicles that would eat other vehicles and adopt their powers and morph. It was really cool. But they would sign three month contracts, and Miyamoto himself would say that he did not want any documents. He would just say, “Find the fun, and I’ll be back in three months to take a look at what you have.”

We went through about three iterations of that. We busted our hump trying different things, but at the end of it, he kept coming back and saying that it wasn’t there, and it wasn’t fun. We were a new company that didn’t know how to make games. After about six or nine months, he came back and said, “You guys have really worked hard, and we see the progress, but we’re not seeing the product. But another opportunity has come up for a fantasy golf game, so why don’t you guys work on that? In three months, we’ll be back. Show us a golf game.”

So rather than getting pissed off at us and canceling the contract after two years and millions of dollars, they spent just a tiny fraction of that with a small team and said, “Well, it was just a bad idea.” It maintained the relationship with them, so we could go off and do something else.

Small teams?  Iterative Development and Feedback Loops?  Rapid Prototyping?  This is all about Agile Development.

How many development teams start off with a huge product idea with massive story ideas and gimmick gameplay, then hit the ground running with full force teams, massive design documents, only to find out two years later when the game is in testing and about to go gold that the game isn’t even fun?

Bowser and Peach

Nintendo does the opposite.  It spends the most amount of time on the prototyping stage to “find the fun.”  Once they find a fun game mechanic that hits a certain critical threshold, that is when Nintendo leverages the full might of its development army to add content, graphics and tons of spit polish.  The story is built around the game, not the other way around.

That is why in many Nintendo games, you don’t really see the story unless you open the manual.  The game functions even without the story or an explanation on why mushrooms make Mario big or why the princess was captured by an evil spikey turtle.  It’s just FUN!

It’s all about focusing on gameplay before glitz.  Rapid prototyping, practice and feedback.