Details from Iwata Asks: The Wonderful 101
Nintendo has published the official Iwata Asks interview dedicated to The Wonderful 101. Director Hideki Kamiya joined Nintendo president Satoru Iwata to discuss the new Wii U game.
It’s not up in English just yet, but various tidbits from the talk have been translated. You can find those below.
– Kamiya played games (Intellivision and the like) mainly at the game corners of department stores because his family couldn’t afford to buy any
– He sometimes went to an upper-classmans house to play their cassette-vision, but was often teased by them
-His first game console he owned was a Famicon/NES, which he bought in middle school. He bought it with the money he got at new years
– He had trouble finding one, but found a store that was going to get 10 of them in stock. He woke up at 4AM to go to the store to buy the Famicon, but 10 people were already lined up.
– A friend of his cousins offered to sell him their Famicon with 15 games for 30000 yen.
– The first game he bought from a store was “Nuts and Milk”
– He feels his time with the Famicon was the funnest period of his life
– While he really enjoyed playing games, he never really thought about the people that created them.
– He first learned about what a game designer was after reading an talk between Miyamoto and Zebius creator Masanobu Endou in the Famicon Magazine.
– It was then, during middle school, that he decided he wanted to be a game designer.
– He didn’t know what to do to become a game designer, and doesn’t feel he put any real effort into achieving it.
– He bought a PC88 intending to learn how to program, but ended up just playing games on it.
– He attempted BASIC, but felt it was impossible for him and gave up quickly
– Iwata didn’t have a PC in high school, but he made games on a program calculator, which were played by someone else in his year
– One of Kamiya’s friends was a Sega fan, and owned a Mark 3; they would constantly discuss which was better between the Famicon and Mark 3
– They also argued over PC’s, with Kamiya owning a PC88, and his friend owning an MSX
– Kamiya’s other friend owned an X1, but was able to buy an X68000 due to his part time jobs
– Kamiya would buy his own X68000 games and play them on this friends PC
– Due to playing games and noy studying, Kamiya failed the exams for the school he was aiming for, and ended up going to his spare choice.
– This school was near the train station, and right near the game center, which he ended up going to every day on the way home from school
