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Email: A mysterious Nintendo argument which is not true

seanmalstrom
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Hello Malstrom. I’m writing because I’ve been witnessing this argument being presented, or very strongly hinted at, in many places, as if it is common sense and widely known fact. It never popped up in your blog because it’s so dumb, but I needed to at least mention it. It’s just everywhere today, and everyone believe it. It goes as follows:
 
– Nintendo games aren’t that big but make up to that with polish and being “quality over quantity”
 
(you also made posts saying how the Japanese are successful due to their high quality and polish, which doesn’t really support this argument, but I see it being used in various places too. I bet it contributed to Nintendo’s ego too)
 
This is nonsense because among Japanese games, Nintendo games were HUGE in the old days. Nintendo games were always about quantity.
Look at Mario, and then look at other platformers in the NES/SNES days. Sonic? Bonk? Those games were a quarter of Mario’s game in size.
Same with Zelda. The Ys games, and Neutopia and other knockoffs, were much smaller than Zelda.
Zelda and Mario were magnum opus for video games, they were complete epics, while Sonic and Ys are basically one “area” out of several in the Nintendo games, one book compared to an entire series. And funnily enough, both Sonic and Ys had games which were meant to be big, but were split in two because they were too “ambitious” (Sonic 3 & Knuckles, Ys I & II) to be developed and released together
 
Nintendo games nowadays skimp out on content because Nintendo thinks their “quality” can make up for the quantity, but when you look back, quantity was never compromised. Nintendo games were both bigger and better. Their games aren’t really “shorter”, but they’re obviously padded out despite being roughly the same size as the old games, where they should be growing bigger even without the padding.Nintendo remains tight lipped about the development practices that go on behind its doors. The Iwata Asks interviews I see as nothing but cotton-candy PR. Most of the time.

We know more today because of Retro. At an interview after showing off DKC 4 at E3, Retro was saying something like, “At Nintendo, things are done DIFFERENTLY. At Nintendo, polish starts very early.” My impression is that there is a feature freeze early on with Nintendo games and a longer polish time until release than most games. All the games Nintendo shows at E3 I suspect are already finished but are just using the remaining time for polish.

I suspect the origin for this argument comes from people in the Game Industry, more familiar with Nintendo’s practices than you or I, know that Nintendo will do a feature freeze earlier on with a longer polish phase.

However, that is Modern Nintendo. Classic Nintendo probably had more of the development time to the features and less time to the polish. Remember that Nintendo imposed a limit of game companies only releasing five games a year on their console in order to prevent an Atari dilemma. This policy forced game companies to spend more time with their games since they could only sell five of them. It did result in better games. I remember NES games seemed so much better, more polished, than what was on computers at the time.

NES games also competed and sometimes dwarfed computer games in their scope. Zelda I and II were massive compared to any computer game at that time (maybe not bigger than a CRPG but definitely competitive). NES Metroid or NES Super Mario Brothers 3 were MASSIVE games at the time.

It is perhaps due to the lower production elements in these times that there wasn’t as much to polish. How much time does there need to polish 8-bit graphics or music? Not much and if you did (like Capcom or Konami), you still had much time left over. I suspect there was more time, then, building up the games’ worlds and features than the long gestation of ‘polish’ that Nintendo games have today.

To give you an idea of those times, Ultima IV (one of the greatest RPGs made) was released in 1985 and played all the way through by one person before it went to the stores (the person was Richard Garriot, the developer).

This might explain the popularity of a game like Minecraft. There is very little need to polish the graphics or sound in such a title. Notch can just keep adding features and more features.

Polish is important, but you cannot polish a turd. If additional features were not important, then why are they always highlighted on the box to generate sales? You never see ‘polish’ highlighted on the box.

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