Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yes, it's clear that Miyamoto has got the golden touch here and has created this whole new discipline of game design, where the same principles as engineering apply. Yamauchi completely understands this, just like he understood with Gunpei Yokoi that there are these certain engineers out there who are so talented and so creative, that they can do things and enable things with technology that nobody else can do. The same dynamics apply to game designers. There are very few Shigeru Miyamotos out there. The value of what they make is worth many, many multiples of what every other game designer out there makes. After Miyamoto proves that he wasn't just a flash in the pan, Yamauchi creates a fourth R&D division within Nintendo. It puts Miyamoto in charge. The sole purpose of this new R&D4 unit, which would later become the legendary Entertainment Analysis and Development group within Nintendo, the sole goal is to make games and to make the very best games in the world. Their manifesto really ends up becoming fun first. That sounds obvious, but in a way, they're zigging where everyone else is zagging, where a lot of other game designers at this point in history are starting from a place of, we need to make a game that's in this category, other people have made this game and it is successful, or games that are great today involve this set of things that everybody thinks you need for a game. What the team that Miyamoto is leading is saying, we are on a quest to be inspired, find fun, and then we will build exactly the right window dressing around that fun, that real kernel, that core mechanic that we love, and no more. We don't need to do any of the other stuff on top of that. If it's fun, if it continues to be fun, and it's super replayable, then our mission is accomplished. It is a very, very, very different approach to how other people were designing games. Exactly. Yamauchi has this great quote about Miyamoto and the Nintendo philosophy of what makes a great game designer. He says, "An ordinary man cannot develop good games no matter how hard he tries. A handful of people in this world can develop games that everybody wants. Those are the people we want at Nintendo." It's just so wild that Yamauchi never played a game in his life.…

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