Shmuplations translates old Japanese game developer interviews and articles, covering Nintendo, Sega, Square, and arcade classics.
Commenters praise it as a gold mine of preserved interviews, especially the Gunpei Yokoi and Sega history pieces, and cite it in discussions of game design.
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…
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…
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.
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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.
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-Creating-Processes
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.
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.