He was appointed by The Nintendo of Japan R&D1 and R&D3, and he was a non-Sumi-keeper of Yamauchi. Others: "Market research? What are you going to do with that? Nintendo creates a market. There's nowhere to investigate. ”。 Big intention: City 场调查? 你怎么调查? Nintendo 创zo City 场, City that is deemed to be required to be subsditored.
Yamauchi relies on intuition to manage Nintendo, which is the biggest difference between game companies and other types of companies, the division between art and industry.
Since ancient times, two-front combat has been the only way to lose. There are only a few successful battles in the history of war that have been successful in two-front operations. But Yamauchi did not think so, and Nintendo wanted to fight on the third line.
The first front: the family console Color TV-Game
In 1974, a new entertainment experience brought by Atari Home Pong and Mirohua Odyssey inspired Nintendo to enter the home console market. Yamauchi reached an agreement with The Mirohua Odyssey, whereby Nintendo received the Odyssey Japan distribution rights and permission to clone the Odyssey.
After obtaining the license, Nintendo began to copy the Odyssey product, which itself has no electronics manufacturing capabilities, based on the experience of working with Mitsubishi Electric to make the EVR Race arcade, Nintendo commissioned Mitsubishi Electric to make this game console, which was developed by Nintendo R&D2. Yamauchi's requirements for this family game console are: cheap.
On June 1, 1977, Nintendo launched its first-generation family console: the Color TV-Game 6, the color TV game 6. Mitsubishi Electric's technology and Nintendo's price requirements have made the cost of color TV game 6 extremely low. Despite this, Yamauchi was still not satisfied, and he decided to delete 9 games. This makes the color TV game 15 with 15 games directly minus 9, becoming a color TV game 6.
The retail price of the color TV game 6 is 9,800 yen, which is less than half the price of other family game consoles on the market. Color TV Game 6 contains 6 variants of Pong, which is a game console specifically designed to play the Pong type. The 6 variants are 3 games plus singles and doubles: the 3 game types are hockey, volleyball, and tennis. Each of them supports singles mode or doubles mode.
The picture shows the color TV game 6.
It didn't take long for Nintendo to release an upgraded version of the color TV game 6. The new color TV 6 is an orange shell. And added a lot of options to set the game process.
The picture shows the settings screen of the new color TV game 6.
Yamauchi also designed a special color TV game 6 custom version for food company House Foods to promote its instant noodles.
The instant noodle customized version of the color TV game 6 sides is very rare, it is estimated that no one can eat so much instant noodles, so the sales volume is not high.
Pictured here is House Foods' custom edition of Color 6.
Color TV Game 6 also produced a dark orange version with Sharp TV for bundling.
On June 8, 1977, the color TV game 15 was released, and its retail price was 15,000 yen. The color TV game 15 was also licensed to Sharp and named: XG-115.
On June 8, 1978, Nintendo released: Color TV Game Racing 112 Color TV Game Racing 112. The price of the Racing 112 was 18,000 yen, which was reduced to 12,000 yen for promotion, and finally dropped directly to 5,000 yen, which is about the same as the price of a toy. Racing 112's built-in game is a racing game, this game console is much larger than the Color 6 and Color 15. It's equipped with directions and shift handles, allowing players to play up to 112 ways to play.
On April 23, 1979, the last in the Color TV Game series, Color TV Game Block Kuzushi, the ultimate brick-and-mortar color TV game, was released. Nintendo built six brick-and-mortar variants in this game, which is a tribute to Atari.
The shell of the ultimate brick was designed by Shigeru Miyamoto, who had just joined the company, and was extremely beautiful compared to the previous three generations.
The picture shows the ultimate brick playing block of the color TV game.
On this machine, Nintendo no longer hides the Nintendo logo, but prints it in the most conspicuous position of the chassis. Ultimate Brick Fighting contains 6 types of brick fighting games. In order to promote the ultimate bricklaying, Nintendo also held a bricklaying masters tournament at a department store.
The picture shows the winner's certificate.
And medals.
It has to be said that Nintendo has played the entertainment gene very well.
The color TV game series was a success for Nintendo, with 1 million units sold each for the Color 6 and Color 15. Racing 112 and Ultimate Bricks sold 500,000 units each. Although the price of Nintendo's game consoles is very cheap, the shipment of color TV game series gives Yamauchi a strong confidence, making Nintendo's transformation into video games more and more resolute.
After the release of the Atari 2600, the popularity of dedicated game consoles continued to decline, and everyone began to build a second generation of EPROM-enabled family game consoles. At this time, Nintendo even released a special game console: Computer TV Game, a computer TV game. The console is huge, the only way to play chess is to play chess, and it sells for 48,000 yen.
The shell of this machine was also designed by Shigeru Miyamoto, but few units were sold, and Nintendo completely discontinued the first generation of family game consoles.
The first front: family game consoles, did not make any money, accumulated some technical strength, small victories.
The second front: arcades
Compared to family consoles, arcade machines are the field that Nintendo entered and you came early on.
Beginning with the development of the light gun shooting system in 1973, Nintendo released in 1974: Wild Gunner Arcade. He also released many arcade games, such as EVR, Skyhawk, War Shark, Space Mania, Sheriff, Magic Monkey and so on. Most are tepid and most are licensed to Sega. Before the advent of Donkey Kong, Nintendo's most important arcade work was: Radar Scope, radar targeting.
In 1980, the Nintendo R&D2 was developed to target the radar arcade, a shooter game played similarly to Taitung's Space Invaders. The production team aimed at the radar gathered Nintendo's elite, Masayuki Uemura led the team, Shigeru Miyamoto was in charge of the graphics, and Nintendo royal musician Hirokazu Tanaka was responsible for the sound effects. Although Shigeru Miyamoto commented on the game as "simple and mediocre" after the game was completed, it did not affect the popularity of radar targeting in Japan. In that era, there was always a market for shooters.
The picture shows the radar aiming game screen.
Yamauchi's son-in-law, Shimi Arakawa, saw the popularity of radar aiming, so he placed a large number of orders to the headquarters through Nintendo USA. The order was large and took up most of Nintendo's funds.
Yamauchi also wants to enter the North American market, after all, it is the main battlefield of video games, he did not consider the risk of such a large order, sent 3,000 machines to his son-in-law.
It took 4 months from Japan to Ship to New York, missing the boom caused by space invaders. Arakawa sold for several months, and 2,000 of the 3,000 arcade machines remained in the warehouse. After learning the lesson of the long sea freight time, Arakawa moved the company directly from the eastern part of the United States to Seattle in the western United States. In order to solve the inventory problem, Arakawa asked his father-in-law to start a new game and modify the radar at the arcade to see if it could save Nintendo's financial crisis.
Receiving a request for help from his son-in-law, Yamauchi carefully investigated inside Nintendo and found that the only person who could do it was Shigeru Miyamoto. So he arranged for Shigeru Miyamoto to develop the game to rescue his son-in-law, supervised by Junpei Yokoi. After receiving the task, Shigeru Miyamoto said self-deprecatingly that "there is no one else available."
According to the characteristics of the video game industry at that time, game designers were often programmers and engineers. Either software or hardware, there is no precedent for artists to act as game designers. Even the four big brothers of Activision, who define game designers as artists, are programmers. Shigeru Miyamoto doesn't know the technology, all he can do is conceptualize and design the game, and then pass the idea on to programmers and engineers to implement. Since Shigeru Miyamoto, pure game art has emerged.
Shigeru Miyamoto said: "I'm not an engineer, I'm not a programmer, I'm just doing design, I let programmers cooperate with me to make games." Probably I was the first game designer to have the discretion to make the game as a whole. So in those days, I sometimes joked that I was one of the five greatest game designers in the world — simply because there were no other game designers in the world. ”
Indeed, if Shigeru Miyamoto is not the world's greatest game designer, who deserves that title?
Pictured here are Shigeru Miyamoto and Mario.
Donkey Kong Donkey Kong
Initially, Nintendo wanted permission to adapt Popeye into the game, but was denied. Shigeru Miyamoto had to create his own, drawing many characters and plots, and finally decided to design a love triangle between a gorilla, a plumber with a hammer, and his girlfriend. It's a lot like Popeye's plot: Popy and his girlfriend Oliver live happily together, the villain Pluto appears every episode to grab Oliver, and Pope will beat Up Pluto after eating spinach. Shigeru Miyamoto claims to have been influenced by the Beauty and the Beast and the King Kong films to complete the game's setting. This is the first time in the history of games to put the story background before production, rather than making up the story as a promotional material after the fact.
Shigeru Miyamoto was confident in his ideas, but since he didn't know how to program, he consulted engineers about the feasibility of various designs. Yokoi believes that Miyamoto's design is too complicated and still helps Miyamoto solve the problem. Shigeru Miyamoto thought of using inclined platforms, buckets, and ladders to implement the game process. With the support of Junhei Yokoi, although Shigeru Miyamoto had a lot of opinions, the technical team realized all the game content according to his opinions and produced a game of about 20KB.
Yamauchi believes that this game is to save his son-in-law in the United States, and it should be released in the United States, so it should be given an English name. Miyamoto decided to name the game "Ape" because Ape is a very strong character. Later, Shigeru Miyamoto wanted to look for some English words meaning "stubborn gorilla" in the Japanese-English dictionary, and found that the word Donkey can express stories of stubbornness and stupidity.
The last name of the game was given: Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong.
The hardware for radar targeting arcades is designed according to the Hardware of Namco Galaxian arcades, which is also a shooting game. There are no high-speed moving enemies in Donkey Kong, and the development team has shrunk the board after removing unnecessary features. The gameplay and graphics of Donkey Kong are then written for the new ROM, leaving the original processor, sound, and monitor unchanged. Character set, scoreboard, on-screen display basic, and radar aiming are consistent.
The picture shows the Nintendo Donkey Kong game.
After completing the development, Yamauchi thought that Donkey Kong would surprise everyone. He called his son-in-law to make arrangements, and your request had been completed.
Believing in his father-in-law's judgment, Arakawa took his Nintendo-American partner to a lawyer and completed the trademark application first.
Donkey Kong is indeed a very quirky game, and in the era of Pac-Man and space invaders, it didn't look very promising. With the endorsement of Yamauchi, Arakawa believes it can save Nintendo USA. Now that CEOs have judged this way, let's get started. The translators began translating donkey kong's story and naming the characters.
There are a total of 3 characters in the game, the gorilla is called Donkey Kong, and the lady is called Pauline. The plumber, according to the Pac-Man nomenclature, is called: Jump-Man. When such a decision was being made, a new situation suddenly occurred.
Nintendo USA moved the company to Seattle after a financial crisis. In Seattle, Arakawa rented a developer's warehouse as the company's headquarters to save costs. Due to the untimely payment of the rent, Mario Siegel ran to Arakawa and insulted him, saying something particularly ugly, and the eldest brother ignored the presence of other Nintendo employees at the time.
Arakawa decided that the little man with the odd beard should not be called Jump-Man, but Mario.
This Mr. Mario Segale has stayed in the history of video game art in such a ridiculous way.
Everything is ready, donkey kong to the market.