Shmuplations

Props to everyone out there digging up, preserving and translating old interviews, articles, etc. Some others doing this work: Did You Know Gaming?: https://www.youtube.com/@DYKGaming/videos Shmuplations: https://shmuplations.com/

This site is a bit of a gold mine, I came across this a interview with gunpei yoki a few years ago (invented the gamboy died in car accident) http://shmuplations.com/yokoi/ What he says about games is really critical and I agree with him. Worth a read.

I would love to visit a museum where I could experience old development software/hardware from Japan. Check out this great article about the seemingly endless creativity at SEGA during the 80s/90s: http://shmuplations.com/segahistory/ It would be so cool to have the original source code to those games available as well - let the kids (and adults:) at the museum edit/draw their own sprites, make modifications (jumping higher, etc) and let them collaboratively compile & run on original arcade cabinets.. One can dream :)

Mario responds SMOOTHLY and INSTANTLY but not physically accurately to the analog joystick controller and buttons, which was the genius of Miyamoto's "outside-in" physical-world-first design methodology, which he describes in his GDC keynotes, that I quoted and linked to here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28814555 >In an earlier talk, he explained that he designed his games starting with how you physically interact with the controls you're holding in your hand, and then inwards into the computer, instead of the other way around like so many other people tend to do. Also there's some great stuff about the controller and physics design here: https://shmuplations.com/mario64/ >Super Mario 64 – 1996 Developer Interviews >—Mario 64 is the lead-off title for the new Nintendo 64… but how did the project first get started? >Miyamoto: Well, in the beginning… we were working on something really simple—deceptively simple, even, from the perspective of the team that would go on to finish the huge, final game. (laughs) There was a room made of simple lego-like blocks, and Mario and Luigi could run around in there, climb slopes, jump around, etc. We were trying to get the controls right with an analogue 3D stick, and once that felt smooth, we knew we were halfway there. And so, along the way, we realized wanted to create a slightly larger area for them to move around in… >—I don’t know if “slightly” is the right word there… >Miyamoto: Well, that’s how it is with all our…

You probably have a point and it's not something I believe completely. My main problem I think is I have seen nothing new in games for 20 years at least. Gunpei yokoi said something similar here: https://shmuplations.com/yokoi/ Yokoi: When I ask myself why things are like this today, I wonder if it isn’t because we’ve run out of ideas for games. Recent games take the same basic elements from older games, but slap on characters, improve the graphics and processing speed… basically, they make games through a process of ornamentation.

From an interview with legendary Nintendo designer Gunpei Yokoi and Yukihito Morikawa of MuuMuu: "Do these playworlds really need to be that photorealistic, I wonder? I actually consider it more of a minus if the graphics are too realistic." https://shmuplations.com/yokoi/

Space Invaders was written by hand, as professional development tools cost way too much at that point. This interview contains a picture of a couple of the pages from the Space Invaders source code notebook. https://shmuplations.com/spaceinvaders/

Here’s a source for Square discussing how they chose the PlayStation over the N64 due to cost: https://shmuplations.com/ff7/

Here [1] is an article about the 30th anniversary of the game (from two years ago), very detailed and interesting but unfortunately it doesn't say anything about his later career. :( [1]: https://shmuplations.com/galaga

I was obsessed with this game when I was a teenager. The concepts for Cloud and Sephiroth being very deliberately drawn from Musashi and Kojiro was news to me: http://shmuplations.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/ff707.jpg

Shameless plug: We collect this kind of material over in https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMakingOfGames/ There's also https://www.reddit.com/r/VideoGameScience for more technical material. BTW: The linked site has a whole lot more articles like this one http://shmuplations.com/games/

TL;DR at E3 in 2009 Tetris Company and their external PR people backdated the year of creation of Tetris from 1985 to 1984, specifically 6th June 1984, and then held a 25th Anniversary party for it on 6th June 2009. All previously existing printed material, copyright filings, documentaries, interviews with Alexey and Hank from before June 2009 state the game was created over a period of three weeks in 1985. -- It's really curious why they would change this date, and specifically to a date that coincided with the Saturday after E3 in 2009. I suspect we'll never know the real reasons, or the real history of a game whose origins are still shrouded by the iron curtain. Hank and Alexey's story has changed frequently over the years, this 1985/4 date change is just the most recent and most perplexing. The 1993 interview cited at the above link https://shmuplations.com/tetris/ says it was created in "three weeks", which means if it was first playable in June 1985 it certainly seems that it must have been created quickly before then. Given that this happened 15 years ago, the "new" date is now embedded in the public record and Tetris Company are sticking with it. The "old" date had existed for 20 years from 1989 to 2009. Thankfully we have printed material, scans on Internet Archive, Wayback Machine, and Wikipedia's own edit history function we have more than enough information to call upon to see through strange historical revisions like this.

For those not familiar with the MSX line of computers, here's an interesting interview with Bill Gates about it. https://shmuplations.com/billgates/ The short history is that it was somewhat modeled on the "post-IBM" IBM-PC market dynamic, with there being an industry standard hardware platform that originated from a single maker (in this case ASCII), but available to anybody, with Microsoft supplying core software components. However, it was to target the 8-bit micro computer market, which at the time had an absolutely dizzying number of incompatible computers even though they often relied on very similar core components (Z80 or 6502 processors, similar audio, similar video, etc.) There was intention to bring it worldwide, and it made its way out of Japan and into Europe, South America, and even a few parts of the Middle-East. However, it never really made it in the most competitive markets of North America and the UK. In the U.S. Jack Tramiel made it a point to underprice and over-feature the Commodore line of computers to beat the MSX and everybody else in the 8-bit market. And in the UK, the ultra-low priced ZX Spectrum line (as well as a healthy market in the BBC Micro and others) kept it out. Ultimately, the 8-bit market just vanished anyway and there were no real credible compatible upgrade paths out of it. There was a 16-bit MSX variant based on the R800 released (the TurboR), but the MSX market was dead by then. The MSX is mostly well known these days as an…

A clue as to the origins of the Zero Wing translation in this interview with Masahiro Yuge of Toaplan: >-Toaplan also ported Zero Wing to the Megadrive. Who came up with the broken English “ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US” from the overseas attract mode? >Yuge: It may have been this guy who was in charge of our exports at the time. He was always having business meetings with people from overseas, and I went to a few of them myself, and his English was really terrible (laughs). http://shmuplations.com/toaplan-yuge1/ And you can see the original All Your Base thread posted by Bad_CRC archived here on Tribal War (all image links are dead, though): http://www.tribalwar.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=24539 I can remember when this was posted on Tribal War and the deluge of mediocre photoshops that it generated. Back then, your internet cred was measured in your photoshop ability. Good times.

I think a lot about Treasure, a quirky game developer that tended to make a bunch of strange games in the past. I think their studio director and founder, Masato Maegawa, understood the value in being more hands-off in a leadership role. [1] [2] Part of me feels like Amazon and Google thought their super-direct top-down style would be successful in a creative project involving larger team, unaware of the lessons previous game developers had learned. Hardspace: Shipbreaker, on the other hand had a unqiue idea and was a critical success, and in a retrospective the developers were very explicit not to impose a top-down attitude to development. [3] (disclaimer: I work at Blackbird Interactive, but not on Hardspace: Shipbreaker) [1] http://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/wii/sinandpunishment/0/1 [2] http://shmuplations.com/aliensoldier/ [3] https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1026825/Forging-Hardspace-Shipbreaker-Cr…