SAN FRANCISCO – There's a method to Nintendo's magic, and Kensuke Tanabe is in charge of teaching it.
While other companies often start by creating massive design documents that detail minute aspects of a videogame's characters and levels, Nintendo produces rapid prototypes. The company creates, tweaks and refines a gameplay mechanic until it is fun and appealing, often spending many months in these very early phases.
"We prototype intensely in the beginning, until we find that core mechanic that really seals the deal," says Tanabe, a producer at Nintendo's home office in Kyoto, Japan. Even after that, Nintendo will change and refine games very late in the production process.
This method of game design, much of which came from the groundbreaking early work of Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto, runs counter to the way many game developers are set up to function. But it's made the company's games some of the best in the world. Tanabe's mission is to take that method out of Kyoto and spread it to Nintendo's studios around the globe.
"Tanabe-san is very patient, even at times when he doesn't need to be," says Michael Kelbaugh, president and CEO of Retro Studios, Nintendo's outpost in Austin, Texas. "He's a good mentor for junior staff, and he really takes his time and is sincere about teaching Americans, Westerners, the Nintendo philosophy. It's really a passion of his."
The success of the method is illustrated in the sales and reception of Donkey Kong Country Returns, developed by Retro under Tanabe's tutelage. Retro's take on Nintendo's primate superstar has been a worldwide smash: In Japan, it's going on 1 million units sold, which is practically unheard of for a game developed in Texas.
The success helped spur a renewed interest in Retro's titles, with Japanese players going back and trying out the Texas studio's Metroid Prime games, which were a huge hit in Western markets but flopped in Japan, where first-person-shooter gameplay has never caught on.
Over the years, Japanese game publishers have increasingly sought to globalize their development efforts, reaching out to crews outside the country to produce titles that appeal to Western markets when their home teams cannot. Capcom, for example, recently tapped Vancouver, British Columbia, developer Slant Six Games to revitalize its Resident Evil horror series as a multiplayer shooter. Most of Sony's big PlayStation 3 games, including Uncharted, Killzone and Ratchet & Clank, are developed by U.S. teams.
In sharp contrast, Nintendo has been reluctant to massively expand its overseas game development. It doesn't simply buy or create Western game studios, then let those studios run wild creating their own franchises. Instead, the company seeks out lesser-known developers and has a core Japanese team work in close partnership with them to create new entries in existing Nintendo series. Somewhere along the line, Nintendo hit on the right formula: Games like Metroid Prime, Punch-Out and Donkey Kong Country Returns have been critical and commercial successes.
'To be honest, I wasn't going to work very often.'The common thread running through these games has been Tanabe. In an interview at Game Developers Conference last month in San Francisco, Wired.com got the chance to ask: Why was he chosen to be Nintendo's ambassador?
Perhaps it was his more than 15 years of experience working with American and British gamemakers, more blunt in their assessments than their Japanese counterparts, that led him to be so direct in his answer.
"To be honest, I wasn't going to work very often," he says. "It had kind of worn me out. And I was drinking too much."
Tanabe, now 48, joined Nintendo out of college in 1987. Very soon after, he found himself doing high-pressure work, including directing Super Mario Bros. 2. As Tanabe began to burn out, he took on responsibilities that were less enormous. One of these was writing the Japanese script for the original Donkey Kong Country, a 1994 game produced in England by developer Rare.
At home in Kyoto, Tanabe wrote the Japanese text for the game, "mostly ignoring the translation," he says with a laugh. "When it was time to take this Japanese-language data and implement it into the game, I went to Rare with it and was part of the editing process."
Rare had its offices in Twycross, nestled in the sheep-dotted English countryside a four-hour drive from Heathrow Airport. He was far from home.
Tanabe says his bosses discovered something about him: When he went to work abroad, he concentrated on his work and didn't play hooky.
"For someone who wasn't going to work all the time, when I did have to deal with people outside the company, I seemed to shape up, so they kept sending me out to do these jobs," he says.
Soon after Donkey Kong Country, Nintendo released the Nintendo 64 hardware. With the new machine came many more games produced outside Japan. A three-month stint at LucasArts helping polish Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire cemented Tanabe's status as Nintendo's ambassador to foreign developers, he says.
Nintendo 64 games developed outside Japan never quite hit the same quality benchmarks as homegrown efforts, but by the time Tanabe worked with Retro to create the first Metroid Prime game in 2002, bringing the classic Nintendo sci-fi action series into the first-person-shooter genre, the combination of talents had truly crystallized. The game was a smash hit.
It wasn't an easy road. The bottom-up game-design philosophy espoused by Miyamoto and Nintendo runs counter to the top-down way many Western studios operated. Beginning a game with a massive bible full of characters and dialog could be a whole lot of wasted work if the game is going to go through massive fundamental changes throughout the development process. Artists can't grow too attached to their work if the constant flux causes them to have to constantly kill their darlings.
'It's much more important to get an employee that's fundamentally open to change.'Artists and designers who are too set in their ways "don't succeed" at a Nintendo studio, says Retro's Kelbaugh.
"It's much more important to get an employee that's open-minded, that is fundamentally open to change," he says. "I would much rather have an employee like that ... as opposed to someone who is exceptionally creative [and] very focused on their particular point of view. If you try to outside-influence that, you are met with problems."
Such flexibility is key to the "Nintendo way," Kelbaugh says.
For Tanabe, such thinking has become second nature. "It's the way I was told to make games," he says.
See Also:- The Secret History of Super Mario Bros. 2
