“If a director can’t judge whether a game’s specifications are good or bad without first implementing them, are they incompetent?” There’s been a good deal of discussion going on about this topic among Japanese developers on X recently – with some criticizing game designers who ask for systems to be implemented “just to check,” increasing the workload of programmers. Offering a counterargument to such talking points, game developer Motoi Okamoto shared some insights about the predominantly “hands-on” development process that goes on at Nintendo.
Although he is now known as the producer of Konami’s Silent Hill series, Okamoto started his game career at Nintendo, where he worked for almost ten years, participating in the development of multiple Mario and Pikmin titles. Joining in on the recent discourse, Okamoto commented on X, “I’ve been seeing some takes along the lines of, ‘Can’t you tell whether a game specification is good or bad without implementing?’ and ‘Directors who can’t judge without implementation are incompetent.’ But at Nintendo, implementing and playtesting is precisely what matters – they don’t make decisions based on what they see on paper.”
He goes on to add that “Programmers who are lazy about implementing things, and project managers and programmers who try to avoid the trial-and-error process using deadlines and budget restraints as an excuse are removed from development teams without hesitation.”
Interestingly, Okamoto describes Nintendo’s development environment as a culture of “everyone being a director,” which suggests that each developer on the team takes on some degree of decision-making when it comes to improving the game. “If a programmer finds a spec boring, they’re free to just implement it in a way they believe will make it entertaining. That’s what professional game programmers do.”
On the other hand, he emphasizes that this doesn’t mean fleshing things out fully only to scrap them. “What’s frowned upon is when a developer can’t make a judgement without elaborate graphics. If you can’t tell whether game mechanics are entertaining based on only stripped-down graphics, you may be treated as incompetent.”
“The biggest danger to creating revolutionary games and hits,” Okamoto explains, “comes from so-called ‘game design experts’ and know-it-all critics who stifle the necessary trial-and-error process. What’s important is not to hesitate to try out even specs that might seem unreasonable at first.”
As prime examples, Okamoto brings up Mario series creator Shigeru Miyamoto and late Nintendo president Satoru Iwata, who have, in his opinion, maintained a humble hands-on approach to making games despite being regarded as “sages” in the industry. By contrast, he comments, “if you claim you can tell without actually making something, I think that’s just plain arrogance.”
At the same time, he also acknowledges that this kind of development style doesn’t necessarily suit every genre, particularly narrative driven games (which Nintendo very rarely develops in-house). For story-driven games, waiting until implementation to make judgements can possibly mean rebuilding expensive assets such as cutscenes, which isn’t viable with the average development budget. Instead, Okamoto says that ideally, the trial-and-error process should be done in the plot stage, with as many iterations as possible.
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