Thursday, 8 December 2011

PANIC! Now stop panicing...

I find it funny that this has become a meme in art, considering that it was used during the second world war...
It's a bit late now...

Just before I start this Blog I like to thank those who checked out my blog yesterday night, I got a HUGE... surge of viewers checking out my page and so far it's been a personal record of mine of a whopping 35 views for my "Wow I'm Lazy" blog post. So thanks guys!
...And on with the blog!

For those who don't listen into the media of the gaming industry, Nintendo's lead Game Desiger/Producer/Director Shigeru Miyamoto announced yesterday that he's going to retire from Nintendo...

That blew my mind...

However it's not as bad as I thought, apparently there was a bit of a communication error with the interview that Wired Magazine had with Shigeru. It turns out that the creator of Super Mario wants to do smaller projects with young developers, after all in Japan, Nintendo owns an Art and IT School called DigiPen where they seek their latest talent.

For those who don't know what I'm rambling about, Shigeru Miyamoto was the man that came up for Super Mario for Nintendo. Back in 1980, Nintendo ran into a problem, their latest Arcade game, Radar Scope, was popular in Japan, but it wasn't making any money in the US. Shigeru, who only worked for the company for a year, and helped design Radar Scope, was given the job to go to the United States, along side with the new Nintendo of America staff, and design a new game out of the parts from the unused Radar Scope machines. Originally Shigeru wanted to make an arcade game on Popeye, but as Nintendo didn't have the rights to the Popeye intellectual property, Shigeru had to come up with something original, at the time he was sharing an apartment with another member of Nintendo of America's staff, and they had an Italian landlord, who many believe was the inspiration for Mario. Shigeru eventually came up with an idea of a game that involved a carpenter, yes Mario started off as a carpenter, not a plumber, where he had to rescue his girlfriend, a woman called Pauline, not Princess Peach Toadstool, from the clutches of a giant ape named Donkey Kong, who was Mario's pet, who went on a rampage after his ill treatment. 


Due to the context of the game, Universal, the publisher of the famous 1933 film, King Kong, felt that this arcade game went against copyright law and attempted to sue Nintendo. However Nintendo had a few of very professional law men, which included John Kirby, who yes his name was used in Nintendo's Kirby franchise, argued that the scenes, characters and props used in the King Kong film is part of Public domain and that anyone could in fact re-create King Kong. Meaning that Donkey Kong and Mario were safe, and in turn created a legacy that would span multiple franchises under Shigeru's name...

Mario detached himself from Donkey Kong and joined up with his brother Luigi in Super Mario Bros for the NES and Famicom.
Shigeru went on to make the Legend of Zelda series based on his Childhood memories of exploring caves.
With Pilot Wings, Shigeru Miyamoto demonstated the Super Nintendo's ablity of using "Mode 7" to create "Faux 3D" effects on screen, enabling smooth scaling, rotation and distortion of two dimensional sprites in his F Zero futuristic racing game.
With British microprocessor manufacturer Argonaut, Shigeru Miyamoto showed off that 3D polygons could in fact be pulled off on the Super Nintendo with help of the "SuperFX" chip with StarFox and StarWing.
Shigeru Miyamoto created the very foundation to how a three dimension game should work in Super Mario 64, by using a free flowing camera represented by a camera man flying on cloud that you can control by pressing the camera buttons on the Nintendo 64 controller.
On the GameCube, Shigeru Miyamoto created a unique real time strategy game that involved a tiny 3 inch tall alien called Olimar to command troops of plant based creatures called Pikmin to help fix his damaged space ship. It was inspired by Shigeru's hobby of gardening, and based the first level of the game by the design of his own garden in Osaka.
The ill-fated Wii Music was created by Shigeru because of his passion for music and playing the guitar, unfortunately this wasn't the best of Shigeru's efforts.


So... With Shigeru going into smaller things, it makes you wonder what the future holds for his franchises that he made for Nintendo. Then again, Eiji Aonuma now directs the current Zelda games, such as Wind Waker, Twilight Princess, and the latest Skyward Sword. As Nintendo Tokyo now leads the work on the latest Mario games such as Mario Galaxy and Super Mario 3D Land. So even if we love Shigeru's franchises it's not like he's still working on them, and from the sounds of things it sounds like he wants to work on smaller projects rather than bigger AAA titles. It's still kind of a shame that someone of such a great importance in the industry is stepping down a little, but then again it's not like we live forever right? We need to look for the latest talent and see what Nintendo's new big hit franchise is going to be!

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