Shinya Takahashi on his career at Nintendo, new role, and Switch
TIME has put up a pretty massive piece about Shinya Takahashi today. You may recognize him from his appearance during the Nintendo Switch Presentation 2017. He’s a director, board member, managing executive officer, and general manager of Nintendo’s Entertainment Planning and Development Division.
TIME’s piece delves into Takahashi’s history at Nintendo and new role at the company. He comments a bit on Switch and more as well. Shigeru Miyamoto also chimes in about wanting to use Switch as an opportunity “to hand over more to the younger generation.”
We have a summary of TIME’s article below. We do strongly encourage you to read the full thing right here.
Takahashi on working on Wave Race 64…
“It was my first step, really, into game development. The reason I wound up on Wave Race was because of my work in 3D graphics. It all started sitting down with these engineers who only had experience with the Famicom and the Super Famicom [the Japanese names for Nintendo’s 8-bit NES and 16-bit Super NES consoles] and the 2D graphics there. We just plopped an SGI [Silicon Graphics, Inc.] machine in front of them and sat down and said, ‘How are we going to make something with this?'”
– Takahashi was already donning different hats, both designing and coordinating work by the rest of the team
“It didn’t matter whether they were new or they’d been here for years, we had the engineers working with the designers, all lined up at the same starting point with zero experience. And then I was helping to pull them along.”
– He and Yoshiaki Koizumi effectively pulled Nintendo into the 3D era, essentially thanks to their enthusiasm for 3D graphics
“Mr. Koizumi was working with Mr. Miyamoto on Super Mario 64, and at this point I’m in the shadows, working on Wave Race 64. And what got us our start was a programmer—he went on to create the base program for Wii Sports—who did the wave programming for the game. Mr. Miyamoto asked, ‘Can’t you do something with that?’ And that was the start of Wave Race 64. We were basically tasked with figuring out how to take the waves created in the tech demo and turn it into something fun.”
On Nintendo getting a motion capture rig after Wave Race 64…
“I started to look at the setup and decided ‘I’m going to see what we can do with this for Ocarina of Time. Everything initially was wired, and so it was very complicated, and we were moving around with all these wires. We had this tiny little room at the back of the company. We were experimenting with it in there, and all of the higher reps would come by and peek and say, ‘What are you doing in there?’ And they’d see a human that’s connected to all these wires.”
– When Nintendo opted to build a Pokemon game for the N64 (Pokemon Stadium), the designers had to create hundreds of distinct character models with signature animations on “a very limited amount of time”
– Takahashi says the task was “dropped down on us from heaven”
– Nintendo began outsourcing help from contractors in Kyoto and Tokyo, making Pokémon Stadium the first Nintendo game in which design groups collaborated from different physical locations
– Takahashi’s charge was to streamline that process
“I look back at Pokémon Stadium less in terms of the game design, and more in terms of that being the role where I learned the most about team management and team operations.”
– Pokemon Stadium was the first time Takahashi worked up close with the late Satoru Iwata
“I’d worked with him before, on a project about two years after I joined the company. But Pokemon Stadium was the first game where we were working very closely together.”
– Used to be two creative groups at Nintendo: Shigeru Miyamoto’s EAD teams (internal and made “very Miyamoto-like games”) as well as Iwata’s SPD teams, which did less actual development, instead working primarily with outside developers
– Takahashi started with EAD
– Wound up shifting to SPD, because for most of his time at EAD, “wasn’t spending time deep in game development, creating actual game worlds”
“I think part of the reason that Mr. Iwata pulled me into SPD was because he saw that I was the kind of person who was better at supporting others in their roles. I got the most pleasure out of seeing their satisfaction when their projects succeeded through my support.” He believes it was for this reason that Iwata shifted him to SPD. For me, the most satisfying thing is when I see someone and I say, ‘Oh, this person is really good for this role,’ and then I see them succeed in that role. That’s what makes me the most happy. I think that’s partially why you haven’t seen me at the fore in talking about game development until now. It’s partially because there hasn’t really been a reason for me to.”
On the new Nintendo Entertainment Planning & Development (EPD)…
“I’m overseeing all of that, but I view my role as being more someone who’s overseeing our producers. I really look at them more as my stable of talent, and I’m their manager. That includes Mr. Miyamoto. Lately I’ve enjoyed saying, ‘I’m Mr. Miyamoto’s manager.'”
Reggie on Takahashi’s role…
“If all of Nintendo’s content creators were to be seen as a symphony, then Mr. Takahashi is our conductor. What I mean by that is, it’s his decision to bring the different players in our orchestra onto a particular game or a particular initiative. He’s the ultimate decision maker in what gets played by the symphony or what gets created by Nintendo as a company. He’s been creating this big show, but because you only see his back, you really don’t know him all that well. But he drives the orchestra and he sets the pace and the bar for the performance.”
– Reggie pushes back on positional comparisons between the preeminent role Takahashi now plays with the myriad ones performed by Iwata, Nintendo’s former “ultimate decision maker,” calling them “different roles, different times, different needs of the organization”
– After Iwata’s passing, the company decided it was time to ask its less visible luminaries to step up
Miyamoto on highlighting different staff at Nintendo during the Switch presentation…
“The people that came out in the presentation, when you look at it from the perspective of Nintendo, they’re actually not new at all. On our end, we’re eventually going to have to retire. So instead of rushing and fumbling when that happens, we wanted to use Nintendo Switch as a kind of turning point to hand over more to the younger generation. After choosing the members to be onstage, we started to think, ‘Wow, maybe we should’ve chosen a younger bunch of people!'”
“I guess from that perspective, Switch hasn’t fully revitalized or rejuvenated Nintendo in terms of age. But with Mr. Takahashi and Mr. Koizumi, they’ve spent a lot of time working with me, so I really feel like they know intuitively the kinds of things that I would think about. So in terms of going outside, of the public eye, these people may seem new, but when you look at it from an internal perspective, I think not much will be changing. People like Mr. Tezuka [the 56 year old co-creator/designer of the Mario and Zelda games] or Mr. Sakamoto [co-creator of the Metroid series, Kid Icarus and more] should really be the ones coming out, but we kind of just skipped their generation.”
Takahashi on Switch…
“It’s obviously a system that from the beginning we wanted to have a versatility of play styles. Even looking at that versatility of play styles, you have to ensure that when it’s connected to the TV, you’re getting home console level performance. At the same time, when you pull it out of the dock and you’re playing it in handheld mode, you have to ensure the battery is sufficient. It’s a question of striking that balance.”
“Our tradition at Nintendo, and this comes from Mr. Yamauchi, is that we’re not a games company, but an entertainment company. When we’re making a game, the first question we always ask is, ‘How are we going to entertain the player with what we’re creating?’ Or, in something that’s maybe a bit more of what you’d call Kansai style, Kansai being the region of Japan where Kyoto is, ‘How are we going to make them laugh?'”
On wanting to be “a bit more behind the scenes” at Nintendo…
“I don’t know if I’ll have to do things like [Nintendo Directs] going forward. As Mr. Iwata was doing all of those things in front of the camera, I was behind the scenes supporting him, of course along with a number of others. But I hope maybe I can keep that up.”
