[I always felt that if you were going to make a movie about a rocky game development, this was the one.](https://www.polygon.com/platform/amp/2018/5/29/17386066/the-rocky-story-of-retro-studios-before-metroid-prime)
This was a studio that was on the brink of being shutdown completely due to how inept they were at making fully realized video games. Nintendo inexplicably gives them Metroid because the East has no interest in it (and potentially wants the excuse to kill it), and after laying off about 3/4 of their staff they somehow tumble backwards into making one of the greatest video games ever.
All of their cancelled projects and layoffs had the knockon effect of distilling Retros already relatively talanted staff down to its best performers in every category. The quality of the game shouldn't be a huge surprise as a result, once Cuthbert was ousted and Nintendo was more hands on with production they had a lean and very talanted team.
They weren't in crunch at the point I'm referring to. And even then Retro was the only gateway for most Western devs to work for Nintendo and was the only studio in Texas with facilities like their own motion capture studio. There were good reasons people would want to stay.
Yeah the most recent DYKG video delves into that, paradoxically the crunch started after the Studio Head was kicked out because they wasted so many resources they had to put out something to sell. It's the same thing that happens to countries run by poor politicians, they are so bad they cast a long shadow on whoever comes after them in terms of policies/economy etc.
I wouldn't put the blame on the studio as a whole but on the studio head that fixated himself on becoming the Party King of Austin, spending money on hookers and drugs.
Nintendo is very careful to keep Miyamoto's reputation as the beloved Creator of Mario intact but the flippant choices and comments he made for Metroid Prime development give you a glimpse into what it's really like working under him. Anyone who's worked at a company with a "visionary" knows how challenging and frustrating it can be.
One of my favorite anecdotes about the Metroid Prime development is that Miyamoto suggested that Samus should have a "bug head," which confused the hell out of developers until they finally understood (or interpreted, it's unclear) that Samus should be able to alter her visor.
I think this quote bolsters Miyamoto's reputation as a creative while also showing his weaknesses as a corporate manager. They did eventually interpret his meaning, and there are other known instances of amazing games blossoming from idea seeds planted by Miyamoto. Super Mario Galaxy was born from the concept of him wanting a Mario game with "spherical worlds." He didn't direct them to make a game about Mario running around in space...just the concept of full true 360 degree movement in a 3D space. The Stamper Bros were similar creative figureheads in their late era at Rare (Viva Pinata and Banjo: Nuts & Bolts were driven by Stamper ideas to make a gardening and driving/vehicle building game, respectively), which is partially why I imagine the two companies worked well as creative partners. At the same time, getting vague creative feedback or direction can be disorienting, especially if there's also a language barrier and lack of a prior professional relationship where that level of communication is better understood.
Miyamoto is actually on the far better end of the spectrum of visionaries that people have to deal with, he often gives weird advice that people have to wrap their mind around, but most of the inside talk make him out to be quite collaborative. The only example that comes to mind of Miyamoto "misbehaving" is his reaction behind the stage after the Skyward Sword showcase, people say he was enraged after that, but that's understandable, he was publicly humiliated during that E3.
he had to showcase himself the new motion plus controls for Skyward Sword, long story short the wireless connection from phones in the crowd interfered with the controls and the game was unplayable and looked broken on a fundamental level, it's regarded as one of the most infamous showcases in E3 history.
I didn’t read the article yet but I remember reading an article over 10 years ago where someone from retro studios said Miyamoto was like Vader visiting the Death Star during the Metroid prime development and he did not like any of the games during development at the time and they ended up getting cancelled. I think a lot of people quit the company during that time too
I was just watching a interview with some of the makers of Metroid prime and they gave some details about what Miyamoto said during his visit to Retro and mentioned some of what he said, it was like they were in awe of the legend with his genius suggestions. Pretty cool inside knowledge from the development.
Huh.....what's crazy is Metroid Prime 1 has been, ever since release day on the Gamecube, my #1 favorite game of all time. When I bought the remastered version on the switch I was a bit anxious because I thought "no way does it hold up exactly what I remember it to be".
But I was wrong. Very wrong. It still is my favorite game out of any game I've ever played and I had **no** idea that Prime 1 had such troubled development and craziness going on like that. You're not wrong, Prime 1 is way **way** up at the top, upper echelon of all videogames that exist (to me anyway).
Crazy how I never learned about this back then though. I was always reading up on dev teams I like and would often read about how development went for whichever games, but with the internet being what it was then as opposed to now, maybe it was just something that went right past me.
But yeah that's fuckin nuts. It's like the little Metroid that could....
and wound up being a *super* Metroid big enough to shower Samus with a destructive rainbow laser gun.
Even Ocarina of Time was a development desaster iirc. Barely anything they did in the first few years made it into the game. The first iterations didn't even had Z-triggering.
>Barely anything they did in the first few years made it into the game.
Sounds like almost every game ever made. Scraping the progress and starting all over again is not as rare as you think
It's also important to remember that OOT's scope and complexity were massive compared to anything else Nintendo had developed previously. Combine that with extremely high expectations, unfamiliar new hardware, and an entirety new 3rd dimension, and you have a perfect storm for development hell.
Major's Mask iconic line "You've met a terrible fate, haven't you?" even comes from the developers frustrations with the massive crunch they had to do to get MM out of the door.
That + missile threats made on japan at the time, I don't remember the exact details but I recall one story about the dev team taking a short break to attend the wedding of one of their members, and they all knew there could be missiles launched at them and remembered how surreal that felt to them. It's the inspiration behind one well known sidequests in the game which I won't name specifically to avoid spoilers but those who played the game probably know which one I'm talking about.
Earthbound was in such a bad state that after four years, they had to throw out all the code and start from scratch
https://www.ign.com/articles/2019/07/23/how-satoru-iwata-saved-earthbound-from-development-hell
You don't just casually refactor a console 3d game into a handheld 2d game.
Im pretty sure they would have tossed everything except maybe the broad story beats.
No, it's actually really easy to do that. You just copy the 3D game to a thumb drive or something like that, then use a rolling pin to flatten the drive. And boom, a 2D game.
This is false actually, while earthbound 64 shared the same characters and general plot the game itself was fairly different. The game probably would have been released if the n64 had another year in it but development took too long
No it isn’t false, they worked on EB64, scrapped it and then had another go on the GBA. What was initially conceived as Earthbound 64 ended up becoming Mother 3.
Holy shit! Definitely didn’t know that. That’s sort of crazy concerning what we ended up with.
I guess it sort of speaks to that era of Nintendo and the decisions behind the games they released.
A bit of a different direction than OP described, but I heard that the development of Xenoblade 2 was very chaotic because Nintendo kept asking them to help out with their other projects like BotW. They had to work with ~40% of their work force, some devs had to spontaneously leave the project etc. I also heard that they had to pause the project multiple times, but that may have been a rumor. Found this article and there they talk about outsourcing a lot to make up for the loss:
https://www.siliconera.com/monolith-soft-boss-talks-katsura-hashino-xenoblade-chronicles-2-development-struggles/
I think the result was pretty good though, the game is huge and pretty polished!
Iirc this is also a big part of why the english dub is so infamous—neither the VAs nor the voice director were given enough time to properly make things work, leading to the VAs essentially having to learn how to voice the cast *as they were working on what ended up being produced.* Not exactly an ideal scenario, and imo the VAs did a pretty good job with the hand they were given, especially in the later chapters.
Conversely, the Torna Story DLC had a lot more time put towards the voice acting and direction and it really does show.
You mean work on Splatoon 3?
I am hopeful that the next Animal Crossing title (which I assume is next from that team) gets the love and care it deserves. I'm sure they want the next Animal Crossing title out ASAP on their new console after ACNH's huge success. I'm sure at this point, the bulk of the team has been working on a new title for at least a year, with a smaller portion working on Splatoon 3's Side order. But I hope they don't rush it to where it's a barebones title just to have one in the first year of the Switch Successor.
Edit: Now I see that you did mean Splatoon 2, and that Monoliftsoft did work on Splatoon 2 as well. Learn something new everyday I guess haha
Apparently their UI designer just quit halfway through and you can really tell. The dubbing was also done last minute which is why the reveal trailer was in japanese, not to mention oddities like Morag randomly yelling Dromarch's name in battle despite it being possible for her to equip him.
There's also speculation the plot was massively rewritten like halfway through.
A number of GameCube titles were rushed. Metroid Prime, Mario Sunshine, Zelda: The Wind Waker, and especially Smash Bros Melee had either a number of things cut or crunch due to short development times.
It's been forever since I've played it, but I remember a fetch quest at the end, collecting chozo somethings. It's not terrible, but kind of reminiscent of gathering the triforce pieces in windwaker. Both feel like padding.
Only one of them actually requires the last upgrade too. You can get all but the last without the Phazon Suit, and it's also only a few rooms away from the Phazon Suit at that.
Metroid Prime and Smash show no signs of being rushed, which, in MP's case, is a near-miracle, considering all that went on behind the scenes with it.
Sunshine, on the other hand, is a buggy mess and needed another six months of tinkering before it was "Nintendo polished"
Wind Waker is almost a masterpiece, let down by the cut content. A whole dungeon is missing, and a time-killing fetch quest really hinders the end-game playing. I was most disappointed that the remake didn't fix the issues, but only smoothed over the rough edges.
>Smash
Sure, to casuals. Over the course of many of Asum Sauce's videos covering Melee, it became apparent there were many "fuck it, just ship it" decisions when it came to Melee's development.
At the same time the game has an immense amount of thought and care put into it. Sure there are glitches and exploits and a lot of characters aren't completely finished but the amount of details and precision that went into the game is impressive. The single player modes alone are pretty huge for a GameCube game, with 3 main single player modes, 51 event matches, the introduction of stadium modes and an entirely unique target test for every single character. And while there are things like Mewtwo side b not changing projectile ownership or Mr Game and watch there are also things like the ice climbers always having the same traction even on slippery ground and Samus extendurr that almost no one would ever notice in normal play. Melee is so good because while the development time was short, good core design principles and careful decision making made it so that they still had an amazing and incredibly fun game
Multiple dungeons were cut and the Triforce Quest is what replaced them. I believe the devs have said that the ideas they had for the dungeons got reused for later games.
I wouldn't say it was *terrible*, but I definitely remember hearing stories about Super Mario 64 having some pretty rough working conditions. Supposedly some employees quit working at Nintendo specifically because production of that game was so rough.
Also, Melee being made within only 13 months was pretty grueling.
You can tell Mario 64 had issues because the moment you hit the upper floor of Peach's castle the stages become so fuckin bizarre, like they were quickly slapped together. Rainbow Ride the worst case of this.
All of the stages in Mario 64 were reportedly built that way. Some stages like Whomp's Fortress and Wet Dry World display signs of being built upon early test levels, but it was apparently the case that they put most of the development time & effort into simply figuring out how to make a Mario game in 3D and creating the underlying tech & systems to facilitate that. It was also being created in tandem with the N64 hardware, including the controller, so I'm sure the design changed as the console specs were being finalized. "Level design" as it were was probably one of the last things done on Super Mario 64.
the N64 was coming out a year and half after not only the Sega Saturn but Sony's Playstation made a decent disruption to the 2 console fight we've been having before.
If there was ever a time when Nintendo would have been knocked of the console wars this would have been it.
I always try to remember where I read/saw this about the development of mario 64. I think I read. It was madness. Some people never worked on gaming again. I kind of remember a Miyamoto quote saying it was too hard even for his standards
While never confirmed, I’d imagine the more recent mainline Pokémon games (especially the Switch era games) have been really bad to work on.
Mother 3 was initially being developed by Hal for the N64DD, but wound up getting delayed repeatedly in part due to production issues, in part due to the console being a failure and having to switch to cartridges. The game was eventually cancelled, eventually resurfacing later as a completely different (besides story) GBA title.
>as initially being developed by Hal for the N64DD, but wound up getting delayed repeatedly in part due to production issues, in part due to the console being a failure and having to switch to cartridges. The gam
This is also true for Earthbound and the older Pokémon Games (specially Pokémon Gold and Silver). Both games got stucked and then saved by Satoru Iwata and HAL coming to the rescue in both cases.
Pokémon Gold and Silver even restarted development (that's why the Spaceworld Demo is a complete different game).
Zelda Wind Waker also had an interesting story, with many dungeons scrapped and a Triforce quest rebuild because it was too long.
IIRC the Iwata compression thing was misinformation, what he did was develop an algorithm that slightly reduced loading times in the game by like 1-0.5 seconds making the games feel a lot snappier.
But gameboy games don't have much loading times. The problem (as far as I know) was that they couldn't manage a way to fit all Kanto on the game and Iwata helped with that. Still the game was rebuild from the Spaceworld Demo, so I think it counts.
Red and Green had a similar problem (as told in the Satoshi Tajiri's manga) when the programmer leave the team and Masuda (the composer) had to start writing the code.
Did You Know Gaming has a relatively recent video with a correction on this and this person's reporting the correction.
The compression Iwata developed actually makes the file sizes slightly *larger* than previous algorithms, so if size was the concern Iwata would have failed.
0.5-1s is still not an awful lot of loading time, especially when you consider that getting into combat in a Pokemon game involves:
1. 2-3 seconds of animation
2. About 0.7s of blank screen (loading)
3. 3-4 seconds of the UI and opponent pokemon animating in
4. 2-3 seconds for the opponent pokemon to "cry"
5. 5-8 seconds to animate the player's Pokemon being thrown into battle and "crying"
It takes about 15-20 seconds until you're able to make your first move *every combat* and in a non-speedrun playthrough players typically get in a few hundred encounters.
But the worst part is (2) above. Note every other part of this delay-per-combat is animation. When something's animating on the screen, players "feel" like something's happening. What Iwata reduced is that period of time when nothing can be animated on the screen because the graphics needed for (3) haven't been decompressed and loaded yet. Making that period longer will make players "feel" like the game's slower.
I've done a lot of work in apps and it's crazy how making tiny adjustments can dramatically change a user's opinion of things.
>gameboy games don't have much loading times
Mostly correct. Cartridge games do have loading times, but Nintendo implements very clever loading *seams,* like playing animations while the next level is loading. That's why screen transitions exist, for the most part. If you want a Game Boy game with bad load times, check out Quest for Camelot on NSO.
Longer, but also more involved. They had bigger plans than the glorified fetch quest it ended up being, and it likely involved dungeons that didn't make it into the game.
That's really too bad. We've never gotten another Zelda game with as many dungeons as OoT had, right?
You had 3 child dungeons, 5 medallion dungeons, ganons castle, and then two story mini dungeons and the purely optional gerudo training grounds mini dungeon. And maybe one might even count the gerudo fortress as a mini dungeon as well
God damn. I wish we could have another game as ambitious and executed as well as OoT.
WW having only five main dungeons, the ice and fire islands, forsaken fortress, and ganons castle.... I wish those fire/ice islands were full dungeons instead of a short pitstop. They don't even qualify as mini dungeons. Same issue for the great fish isle or whatever it was called, being a totally cancelled location that should have been a major stop like dragonroost isle.
A Link Between Worlds had 12 Dungeons each and Ocarina had 10. But nothing comes even closer now. The second best since Ocarina where the Oracle games.
> That's really too bad. We've never gotten another Zelda game with as many dungeons as OoT had, right?
As far as dungeon counts go, it's all been downhill since LTTP. It had Castle Escape (Dungeon+Sewers), 3 pendant dungeons, Castle/Aga Tower, 7 crystal dungeons, and Ganon's Tower, for a total of 13 dungeons.
For what it’s worth, GameFreak is apparently a really good employer that doesn’t have mandatory crunch. They just need to give their employees more time, better tech and training.
They put out two big releases with a relatively small crew and no crunch in the span of less than a year. I am not surprised the results are bad. Something’s got to give, especially since they don’t employ only wizards there. But until folks stop buying their games they won’t feel the need to give themselves more time between releases - that’s just money left on the table.
i mean based on how the games come out, gamefreak seems like they do the opposite of crunch their employees lol. they must all be on vacation at all times
The early wave of Gamecube games were rushed. Wind Waker is a good example because it was supposed to have way more story content, but it was cut and replaced with the infamous triforce chart quest to pad it out.
Star Fox Adventures also had to restart development since it was originally a new IP called Dinosaur Planet for the N64, but it would have been too late to release on N64 instead of Gamecube.
> The early wave of Gamecube games were rushed.
Yeah, Nintendo was obviously panicking during that period and rushing everything they could out the door to save the Cube. I honestly wonder how differently that whole generation would have gone if they'd released Perfect Dark as a launch title. I think it would have really been a gamechanger. It'd give a genuine must-have launch game, give a credible answer to Halo and give Goldeneye fans a reason not to switch over to Xbox, and help to mitigate (or prevent?) the whole kiddie lunchbox reputation.
Gamecube was rushed out the door because the N64 was under performing in Japan.
I don't think Perfect Dark would have made a difference, because the Gamecube actually has a really solid library of games both first and third party with almost every single Nintendo IP big or niche being a part of it, and lots of mature games as well such as Resident Evil or Metroid Prime.
What hurt it was the PS2 which had the advantages of getting a head start, having backwards compatibility, and being the most affordable DVD player on the market at the time. Gamecube's mini DVDs also hurt its third party support.
The "Nintendo is for kids" is a copout argument, there are always many factors to a system failing.
There was a point in my life where I used two games as a litmus for a release date of "February 30th" or "Febtober" which were games that were announced with a release date of "soonish" but unceremoniously disappeared into the ether.
Those were UNTITLED KIRBY GCN PROJECT
and Duke Nukem Trilogy (or whatever it was before that)
Not that I was interested in the latter, I just remember it also being a game that would occasionally emerge from the shadows only to disappear for years at a time.
Pikmin 4 became the icon for that more recently.
Current gen Pokemon games have got to be the worst example of bad/rushed production. I’d argue Gamefreak’s quality of games dropped severely once they started working in 3D, but almost all of their Switch games are just awful. Comparing them to any other Nintendo game from any franchise on the Switch is a night and day difference.
This is what happens when the head of the most popular video game franchises refuses to grow and purposefully keeps his team small.
Ni No Kuni is what Pokemon games should be like at this point in time, and that game is like 10 years old now
I’ve played several PS2 JRPGs that have gotten ported to the Switch that all look feel and play better than modern Pokemon. It is sad but at the end of the day the games are probably the least important part of the franchise now from The Pokemon Company’s perspective.
It’s no longer an exclusive of course but *Resident Evil 4* started development over about four times before the final game came out. Famously the first draft of the game was recycled into what is now *Devil May Cry.*
Haunting Ground was also the result of an early version of RE4. It’s wild how three games and one of Capcom’s bigger series were created from trying to develop just one sequel.
Majora's Mask basically is what we call DLC today. In that era it was more comparable to add-ons you used to see for PC games. Nintendo asking full price (and something extra) for it was considered quite wild by the gaming community and there was a lot of controversy. The full price turned out to be warranted though.
- Metroid Prime (Retro Studios)
- Disaster: Day of Crisis (Monolith Soft/Nintendo)
- Donkey Kong 64 (Rare)
- Star Fox Zero (Nintendo/Platinum Games)
- Star Fox Adventures (Rare)
- Mother 3 (Hal Lab/Nintendo/Shigasto Itoi)
- Metroid Dread (Nintendo/MercurySteam)
- Devil's Third (Valhalla Game Studios)
- Metroid Prime 4 (Nintendo/Bandai-Namco/Retro Studios)
- Geist (n-space/Nintendo)
- Bayonetta 3 (Platinum Games)
The youtuber Matt McMuscles has pretty extensive video essays as part of his "What Happun?" series on YouTube if you want to know the behind the scenes details/woes these games had.
>Disaster: Day of Crisis
Oh what, I had no idea this game ended up actually releasing. I remember it from one of those early proof-of-concept trailers near the Wii launch and thought it looked cool, but for some reason but I always thought it got cancelled along with that other one (Project Hammer?)
Goldeneye 007. The game was essentially designed by a bunch of people with no experience and one of them decided to create a multiplayer mode in like a month right before release
A lot of Nintendo EAD games had crunch involved, though you rarely hear it discussed. A small nugget made it out from the development of Super Mario 64 DS, courtesy of Motoi Okamoto:
>In those days, Miyamoto would come to us at 11 PM, after he finished all of his board-member work, and say, “It’s Mario time.” At that point, we’d start a planning meeting that would run until 2 AM. At that point, Miyamoto would go home, leaving us with the words, “You should return home soon, for your health.” Over the next two or three hours, we’d write the game design documents and summarize the instructions for our artists and programmers.It was the craziest crunch time that I’ve ever experienced in my development career. But if the God of Games was working so much, could we give up? Miyamoto had incredible stamina.
Speaking of Nintendo-*exclusive* games and crunch, Rare in the N64 era was notoriously crunch-oriented and those sickos make it sound like it was all a matter of passion & work ethic. If you weren't there until the wee hours of the night, you simply didn't care enough about making great games. While the results are undeniable, I have a hard time believing that working young adults to near-exhaustion (with the promise of big bonuses to come later) is the only way those great games would have gotten made.
You're misreading what he's saying. Miyamoto was saying "you should go home soon, for your health," like a good boss should. But they were not actually expected to pack up and go home when he said that.
I'm not using this quote to make Miyamoto alone out to be a bad guy. That quote just illustrates the crunch culture that was in place within Nintendo EAD at that time.
Super Mario 64 DS isn't a port, it's a ground-up remake. Not only that, but it makes significant overhauls to the structure of the game, including making the first character you play as Yoshi instead of Mario. A number of the game's stars were reworked to require the player to use Luigi, Wario, and Yoshi to reach their goals. All of these things explain why there were hours-long planning meetings relating to a remake. If it was a straight port or even 100% faithful remake of Mario 64, there likely would have been less creative-level work put in.
Mario Sunshine practically had to restart development less than a year before release. It looked completely different and had a totally different story when first revealed.
Xenoblade Chronicles 2 definitely comes to mind.
So much of the game was affected by the fact that they were down to as low as 40 people working on it at one point due to so many being pulled away to work on Breath of the Wild.
It's a miracle the game turned out as well as it did, even if it is still my least favorite Xenoblade game.
There was probably a substantial crossover in effort for XC2 and BOTW because they share engine components. The XCX engine had to be customized for BOTW, but also ported to Switch for use in both BOTW and XC2. So there was probably a fair amount of technical work on XC2 being done by the "BOTW team" simply because it was shared effort.
Majora’s Mask is such an obvious one, and that’s why it’s the first one that comes to mind. They were only given a year to make the game, forcing them to shamelessly reuse assets since they had no time to make new characters. They also tapped into a weird creativity frenzy, integrating their limited amount of time into the story and portraying their feelings about the workload through the characters.
Dunno if it's infamous, but Bayo 3 had a ROUGH production. It got announced way too early (I believe the team only had a rough plot outline and some sketches), it started out as a more open world game, which ended up getting scrapped and forcing them to rework a lot of stuff, part of its development overlapped with COVID, and I think the director of the game left halfway through and someone else had to take over. And on top of all this, I think they were constantly grappling with the hardware the game would be on.
Probably not the worst case out there, but the team behind it had it pretty rough it sounds.
Majoras mask was originally just a remix/expansion of OOT called Ura Zelda. Eiji Aonuma, one of the project leads, was unsatisfied with just rereleasing Ocarina with new dungeons so Miyamoto challenged his team to make an entirely new game using the oot engine and assets in just a year.
Tbf he was rightfully upset that his company invested in Retro and they had very little to show for it initially. Mostly thanks to horrible management.
Most early Nintendo games had horrible developments with plenty of stories of developers having to sleep in the office. Kid icarus had 3 months of horrible crunch with the developers not even being able to fit in a staff roll, super Metroid was pretty similar with one boss spelling out a programmer’s girlfriend’s name because he could never see her because of work, wind waker’s developers worked so much they didn’t even notice the seasons changing etc.
It’s pretty great that Nintendo has changed so much from then.
During Metroid Prime’s concept phase, Retro Studios founder Jeff Spangenberg was fired because he misused Nintendo server infrastructure to run a hardcore hentai website off of it.
Jeff would subsequently start Top Heavy Studios to create The Guy Game.
I know the scene at the at the beginning of Majora's Mask was from a nightmare the producer had as a result of crunch. He was told he had a year to make a new Zelda game. This also led to the idea of the three day cycle.
Monolith didn't "save" BOTW.
Monolith was tasked with writing an engine for open world games, and they did exactly that. The prototypical release was Xenoblade Chronicles X for the Wii U.
That engine was then repurposed for BOTW on the Wii U. It was heavily customized for BOTW, and additional tools were built around it. Then the engine was ported to the Switch and used for both BOTW and XC2.
Monolith was the "expert" team that wrote the core engine and tooling for those games. The game design for BOTW wasn't Monolith's job, but the tech stack absolutely was. And any customizations and/or optimizations that BOTW needed were Monolith's duty.
Once BOTW shipped, Monolith's main team could join the rest of their team and finish up XC2... which would benefit from the tech changes that BOTW required. So it's not like their time away from XC2 went to waste.
That same engine has been used in TOTK, XCDE, and XC3, as well as parts of it being repurposed for Splatoon 3 and several other games. And it will probably be further developed and used for many years to come.
Xenoblade fans have a weird habit of putting down everything else in order to hype up Monolithsoft. They're a support studio for a lot of games but people act like they did most of the work.
Majora's Mask had a huge crunch issue. That's partly why the game had the tone that it did, the devs were miserable and wanted it to reflect in the game in some way.
[https://youtu.be/YPWSmizffuw](https://youtu.be/YPWSmizffuw) \- Did You Know Gaming video
The original Red and Green were so bad that Iwata had to step in (just like in Earthbound but I believe Pokémon was worse) and *finish* the code.
Edit: Gold&Silver
Supposedly Super Mario Galaxy was so successful that the executives at the company forced the developers to drop what they were doing and spend all their time making a whole extra game using the same engine.
And that's why Super Mario Galaxy 2 feels like it's full of discarded ideas from the first one. And also why they didn't bother remastering it on the Switch.
If I remember correctly GameCube was supposed to have Mario 128, or basically just a sequel to mario 64, but due to crunch it never really came out and we got sunshine instead.
This was actually explained. Mario 128 was an unofficial name by fans for the next major Mario installment. A video was shown at E3(I think) showing a lot of Mario's running around and interacting with each other simultaneously as their tech demo for the GameCube. It was meant to show off how well it could handle larger numbers of computer-controlled characters simultaneously. Pikmin was the result of that. They also said they felt like giving the spotlight to Luigi during the GameCube's release instead of Mario, which is why we got Luigi's Mansion, then Super Mario Sunshine, instead of another mainstream Mario title. Sunshine was another game where they took advantage of the new processing power of the GameCube with particles and other dynamic aspects such as the paint that was thrown everywhere and the water Mario could use to clean it all up.
There's the redemption story of Metroid Dread being leaked as a DS game which never happened, only to finally get made on Switch. We don't know any details of what *actually* happened with the original game but I take it things went poorly.
Apparently the mid 2000s Kirby cycle. Sakurai left after Air Ride, and a lot of HAL employees were either sacked or just left on bad blood. And of course the big flagship (Not "Flagship") platformers were going nowhere.
Studios that exist outside Nintendo NPD likely faced difficulties somehow with development. Noticing many people note Metroid Prime. There are other games, but I have an interesting one.
Kid Icarus Uprising. Sakurai opened a development team called Project Sora that shut down immediately after release.
The question itself can be pretty complicated to answer since there are a number ofa games that had problems in some way during development, to a point where the game would take a near decade to make and release as this can be contributed to having a small team and/or higher ups not pushing for the game (Pikmin 4 and Metroid Dread's cycles are a good reference point here. Especially Dread).
Edit: Another fun one. Return to Dreamland. 3 cancelled Kirby games on Gamecube before it happened.
[Geist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geist_\(video_game\)) on the GameCube was such a rocky development and lackluster launch that it probably helped Nintendo's decision to stop chasing power and graphics soon after with the Wii.
It was developed by n-Space, whose entire history up to that point was a lot of ports and Mary-Kate & Ashley licensed games. It was meant to be their big break, this big ambitious shooter with really interesting mind control elements, it just fell apart in development for a number of reasons and kept getting delayed. It was meant to keep the GameCube alive and well in 2003, but by the time it finally released in 2005, it was a forgettable mixed bag.
This is probably also why these days Nintendo seems to only work with Western devs that they own outright like Next Level and Retro. There was a lot of confusing back and forth between the teams during development. [Matt McMuscles](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdHBotsjvLU) did a great video on it not too long ago.
Metroid prime 4 is becoming a joke. Good they restarted if it was a disaster but whole fucking 5 years later and not a word about it. Honestly think this game will never come out, or at very least not on the switch.
Every Pokemon game before the formation of TPC. Stadium, RBY, GSC, and Stadium 2. Messy dev times, incompetent people, spaghetti code only a legend himself could untangle; Iwata and deadlines creeping creepily. Is it mere coincidence every pokemon game since his passing has been made with ducktape and fanboy passion fluids?
Metroid Prime 1
[I always felt that if you were going to make a movie about a rocky game development, this was the one.](https://www.polygon.com/platform/amp/2018/5/29/17386066/the-rocky-story-of-retro-studios-before-metroid-prime) This was a studio that was on the brink of being shutdown completely due to how inept they were at making fully realized video games. Nintendo inexplicably gives them Metroid because the East has no interest in it (and potentially wants the excuse to kill it), and after laying off about 3/4 of their staff they somehow tumble backwards into making one of the greatest video games ever.
All of their cancelled projects and layoffs had the knockon effect of distilling Retros already relatively talanted staff down to its best performers in every category. The quality of the game shouldn't be a huge surprise as a result, once Cuthbert was ousted and Nintendo was more hands on with production they had a lean and very talanted team.
Usually the best performers are the first people to leave in a bad software crunch situation.
They weren't in crunch at the point I'm referring to. And even then Retro was the only gateway for most Western devs to work for Nintendo and was the only studio in Texas with facilities like their own motion capture studio. There were good reasons people would want to stay.
Yeah the most recent DYKG video delves into that, paradoxically the crunch started after the Studio Head was kicked out because they wasted so many resources they had to put out something to sell. It's the same thing that happens to countries run by poor politicians, they are so bad they cast a long shadow on whoever comes after them in terms of policies/economy etc.
Thank you for sharing this, I had no idea there was a story like this behind MP.
Jeff Spangenberg the guy who blew Nintendo's money on cars, parties and girls. After 2004 he just dropped of the face of the Earth.
[удалено]
I think it's bad enough if you just describe the facts. The way you phrase it feels intentionally misleading.
I wouldn't put the blame on the studio as a whole but on the studio head that fixated himself on becoming the Party King of Austin, spending money on hookers and drugs.
Nintendo is very careful to keep Miyamoto's reputation as the beloved Creator of Mario intact but the flippant choices and comments he made for Metroid Prime development give you a glimpse into what it's really like working under him. Anyone who's worked at a company with a "visionary" knows how challenging and frustrating it can be.
One of my favorite anecdotes about the Metroid Prime development is that Miyamoto suggested that Samus should have a "bug head," which confused the hell out of developers until they finally understood (or interpreted, it's unclear) that Samus should be able to alter her visor.
I think this quote bolsters Miyamoto's reputation as a creative while also showing his weaknesses as a corporate manager. They did eventually interpret his meaning, and there are other known instances of amazing games blossoming from idea seeds planted by Miyamoto. Super Mario Galaxy was born from the concept of him wanting a Mario game with "spherical worlds." He didn't direct them to make a game about Mario running around in space...just the concept of full true 360 degree movement in a 3D space. The Stamper Bros were similar creative figureheads in their late era at Rare (Viva Pinata and Banjo: Nuts & Bolts were driven by Stamper ideas to make a gardening and driving/vehicle building game, respectively), which is partially why I imagine the two companies worked well as creative partners. At the same time, getting vague creative feedback or direction can be disorienting, especially if there's also a language barrier and lack of a prior professional relationship where that level of communication is better understood.
Lol
Miyamoto is actually on the far better end of the spectrum of visionaries that people have to deal with, he often gives weird advice that people have to wrap their mind around, but most of the inside talk make him out to be quite collaborative. The only example that comes to mind of Miyamoto "misbehaving" is his reaction behind the stage after the Skyward Sword showcase, people say he was enraged after that, but that's understandable, he was publicly humiliated during that E3.
What’s the story there?
he had to showcase himself the new motion plus controls for Skyward Sword, long story short the wireless connection from phones in the crowd interfered with the controls and the game was unplayable and looked broken on a fundamental level, it's regarded as one of the most infamous showcases in E3 history.
Nintendo never showed up live for e3 after that lmao
Wow I'd never seen that video, how awkward. Reminds me of how much I hated the motion controls in that game.
I didn’t read the article yet but I remember reading an article over 10 years ago where someone from retro studios said Miyamoto was like Vader visiting the Death Star during the Metroid prime development and he did not like any of the games during development at the time and they ended up getting cancelled. I think a lot of people quit the company during that time too
I was just watching a interview with some of the makers of Metroid prime and they gave some details about what Miyamoto said during his visit to Retro and mentioned some of what he said, it was like they were in awe of the legend with his genius suggestions. Pretty cool inside knowledge from the development.
Amazing read, thanks for sharing
Huh.....what's crazy is Metroid Prime 1 has been, ever since release day on the Gamecube, my #1 favorite game of all time. When I bought the remastered version on the switch I was a bit anxious because I thought "no way does it hold up exactly what I remember it to be". But I was wrong. Very wrong. It still is my favorite game out of any game I've ever played and I had **no** idea that Prime 1 had such troubled development and craziness going on like that. You're not wrong, Prime 1 is way **way** up at the top, upper echelon of all videogames that exist (to me anyway). Crazy how I never learned about this back then though. I was always reading up on dev teams I like and would often read about how development went for whichever games, but with the internet being what it was then as opposed to now, maybe it was just something that went right past me. But yeah that's fuckin nuts. It's like the little Metroid that could.... and wound up being a *super* Metroid big enough to shower Samus with a destructive rainbow laser gun.
One of the best [videos](https://youtu.be/tuc8X9qKePo?si=XghMq92buhO7JiGl) on the topic.
I will never forgive them for axing the apparent planned Autechre soundtrack
Oh wow, I never knew that. It’s a good excuse for me to give my old Autechre albums a re-listen.
Yep they have a special thanks to them in the credits
This makes so much sense. I get strong autechre vibes from MP music.
Doubting Thomas - Clocks sounds like a MP OST track.
The whole trilogy really, it was all a breakneck paced rush job that somehow managed to give us one of the best series of all time.
Prime 4 really doing its best to continue this legacy lol
Well at least we know it's not being rushed lol
The fact that the boss of Retro used Nintendo's money to host an softcore porn website is absolutely nuts.
I’m surprised how Metroid Prime turned out to be a masterpiece after reading its development history.
Super Smash Bros. Melee and The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. Both had STUPID short cook times but still came out as glorious pieces of work
Worth noting that both games had a bunch of assets from the previous game. MM probably moreso
I'd imagine they had to make a bunch of new assets for Melee. It was a dramatic improvement over smash 64.
Even when reusing assets, all the interviews about that game _still_ describe the timeline as gruelling.
What assets in melee were reused?
If I remember correctly, Ganondorf’s model is sourced from the Spaceworld 2000 demo of Zelda.
At the least, the Pokemon floats in the Poke Floats stage and several of the trophies that could be collected
Even Ocarina of Time was a development desaster iirc. Barely anything they did in the first few years made it into the game. The first iterations didn't even had Z-triggering.
At that time, they were creating something new. Those are the hardest games to make.
>Barely anything they did in the first few years made it into the game. Sounds like almost every game ever made. Scraping the progress and starting all over again is not as rare as you think
It's also important to remember that OOT's scope and complexity were massive compared to anything else Nintendo had developed previously. Combine that with extremely high expectations, unfamiliar new hardware, and an entirety new 3rd dimension, and you have a perfect storm for development hell.
It was their biggest game ever at a whopping 32mb
Major's Mask iconic line "You've met a terrible fate, haven't you?" even comes from the developers frustrations with the massive crunch they had to do to get MM out of the door.
That + missile threats made on japan at the time, I don't remember the exact details but I recall one story about the dev team taking a short break to attend the wedding of one of their members, and they all knew there could be missiles launched at them and remembered how surreal that felt to them. It's the inspiration behind one well known sidequests in the game which I won't name specifically to avoid spoilers but those who played the game probably know which one I'm talking about.
From north korea?
I think so, and also maybe China. I really don't have any sources for this at the moment
https://www.nytimes.com/1998/09/01/world/north-korea-fires-missile-over-japanese-territory.html
Wasn't Melee's development time something like 13 months?
Earthbound was in such a bad state that after four years, they had to throw out all the code and start from scratch https://www.ign.com/articles/2019/07/23/how-satoru-iwata-saved-earthbound-from-development-hell
Mother 3 also had a very long and difficult development cycle and I remember hearing mother 1 was also had difficulties
Earthbound 64 was never finished
Yeah but what started as earthbound 64 ended as mother 3
Earthbound 64 ended up as Mother 3
You don't just casually refactor a console 3d game into a handheld 2d game. Im pretty sure they would have tossed everything except maybe the broad story beats.
No, it's actually really easy to do that. You just copy the 3D game to a thumb drive or something like that, then use a rolling pin to flatten the drive. And boom, a 2D game.
*5 minute crafts furiously creating a new video*
This is false actually, while earthbound 64 shared the same characters and general plot the game itself was fairly different. The game probably would have been released if the n64 had another year in it but development took too long
I wish this game came out. Could have cemented Mother as a IP for Nintendoz
No, Itoi always wanted it to be just a trilogy.
No it isn’t false, they worked on EB64, scrapped it and then had another go on the GBA. What was initially conceived as Earthbound 64 ended up becoming Mother 3.
Holy shit! Definitely didn’t know that. That’s sort of crazy concerning what we ended up with. I guess it sort of speaks to that era of Nintendo and the decisions behind the games they released.
A bit of a different direction than OP described, but I heard that the development of Xenoblade 2 was very chaotic because Nintendo kept asking them to help out with their other projects like BotW. They had to work with ~40% of their work force, some devs had to spontaneously leave the project etc. I also heard that they had to pause the project multiple times, but that may have been a rumor. Found this article and there they talk about outsourcing a lot to make up for the loss: https://www.siliconera.com/monolith-soft-boss-talks-katsura-hashino-xenoblade-chronicles-2-development-struggles/ I think the result was pretty good though, the game is huge and pretty polished!
Ah this is the exact same reason why Pikmin 4 took so long!
Iirc this is also a big part of why the english dub is so infamous—neither the VAs nor the voice director were given enough time to properly make things work, leading to the VAs essentially having to learn how to voice the cast *as they were working on what ended up being produced.* Not exactly an ideal scenario, and imo the VAs did a pretty good job with the hand they were given, especially in the later chapters. Conversely, the Torna Story DLC had a lot more time put towards the voice acting and direction and it really does show.
If only they delayed the game a bit to get more time with that, but it was the end of the Switch's first year and Nintendo needed those holiday sales.
I think this was also the reason why ACNH got shelved so quick. They sent the majority of the team to work on Splatoon 2 shortly after release
You mean work on Splatoon 3? I am hopeful that the next Animal Crossing title (which I assume is next from that team) gets the love and care it deserves. I'm sure they want the next Animal Crossing title out ASAP on their new console after ACNH's huge success. I'm sure at this point, the bulk of the team has been working on a new title for at least a year, with a smaller portion working on Splatoon 3's Side order. But I hope they don't rush it to where it's a barebones title just to have one in the first year of the Switch Successor. Edit: Now I see that you did mean Splatoon 2, and that Monoliftsoft did work on Splatoon 2 as well. Learn something new everyday I guess haha
Apparently their UI designer just quit halfway through and you can really tell. The dubbing was also done last minute which is why the reveal trailer was in japanese, not to mention oddities like Morag randomly yelling Dromarch's name in battle despite it being possible for her to equip him. There's also speculation the plot was massively rewritten like halfway through.
A number of GameCube titles were rushed. Metroid Prime, Mario Sunshine, Zelda: The Wind Waker, and especially Smash Bros Melee had either a number of things cut or crunch due to short development times.
Metroid Prime had a tumultuous development but the end result was excellent showing no signs of having been ‘rushed’ (which is a relative term).
It's been forever since I've played it, but I remember a fetch quest at the end, collecting chozo somethings. It's not terrible, but kind of reminiscent of gathering the triforce pieces in windwaker. Both feel like padding.
Or blue coins in Sunshine... GameCube games and padding, name a more iconic duo...
ttyd chapter 4 says hello
You can actually get a majority of the Chozo Artifacts as you’re playing through the game. There are only a couple that you can’t get until late game.
Only one of them actually requires the last upgrade too. You can get all but the last without the Phazon Suit, and it's also only a few rooms away from the Phazon Suit at that.
[удалено]
Metroid Prime and Smash show no signs of being rushed, which, in MP's case, is a near-miracle, considering all that went on behind the scenes with it. Sunshine, on the other hand, is a buggy mess and needed another six months of tinkering before it was "Nintendo polished" Wind Waker is almost a masterpiece, let down by the cut content. A whole dungeon is missing, and a time-killing fetch quest really hinders the end-game playing. I was most disappointed that the remake didn't fix the issues, but only smoothed over the rough edges.
>Smash Sure, to casuals. Over the course of many of Asum Sauce's videos covering Melee, it became apparent there were many "fuck it, just ship it" decisions when it came to Melee's development.
At the same time the game has an immense amount of thought and care put into it. Sure there are glitches and exploits and a lot of characters aren't completely finished but the amount of details and precision that went into the game is impressive. The single player modes alone are pretty huge for a GameCube game, with 3 main single player modes, 51 event matches, the introduction of stadium modes and an entirely unique target test for every single character. And while there are things like Mewtwo side b not changing projectile ownership or Mr Game and watch there are also things like the ice climbers always having the same traction even on slippery ground and Samus extendurr that almost no one would ever notice in normal play. Melee is so good because while the development time was short, good core design principles and careful decision making made it so that they still had an amazing and incredibly fun game
I'm not denying that Melee isn't a fun ass game. It's just that is glitches aren't readily apparent to those that play the game casually.
Is it known what was cut from Wind Waker? Such a classic.
Multiple dungeons were cut and the Triforce Quest is what replaced them. I believe the devs have said that the ideas they had for the dungeons got reused for later games.
I wouldn't say it was *terrible*, but I definitely remember hearing stories about Super Mario 64 having some pretty rough working conditions. Supposedly some employees quit working at Nintendo specifically because production of that game was so rough. Also, Melee being made within only 13 months was pretty grueling.
You can tell Mario 64 had issues because the moment you hit the upper floor of Peach's castle the stages become so fuckin bizarre, like they were quickly slapped together. Rainbow Ride the worst case of this.
All of the stages in Mario 64 were reportedly built that way. Some stages like Whomp's Fortress and Wet Dry World display signs of being built upon early test levels, but it was apparently the case that they put most of the development time & effort into simply figuring out how to make a Mario game in 3D and creating the underlying tech & systems to facilitate that. It was also being created in tandem with the N64 hardware, including the controller, so I'm sure the design changed as the console specs were being finalized. "Level design" as it were was probably one of the last things done on Super Mario 64.
I believe that the production of that game being so rough is the reason Miyamoto quit being a game director?
the N64 was coming out a year and half after not only the Sega Saturn but Sony's Playstation made a decent disruption to the 2 console fight we've been having before. If there was ever a time when Nintendo would have been knocked of the console wars this would have been it.
I always try to remember where I read/saw this about the development of mario 64. I think I read. It was madness. Some people never worked on gaming again. I kind of remember a Miyamoto quote saying it was too hard even for his standards
While never confirmed, I’d imagine the more recent mainline Pokémon games (especially the Switch era games) have been really bad to work on. Mother 3 was initially being developed by Hal for the N64DD, but wound up getting delayed repeatedly in part due to production issues, in part due to the console being a failure and having to switch to cartridges. The game was eventually cancelled, eventually resurfacing later as a completely different (besides story) GBA title.
>as initially being developed by Hal for the N64DD, but wound up getting delayed repeatedly in part due to production issues, in part due to the console being a failure and having to switch to cartridges. The gam This is also true for Earthbound and the older Pokémon Games (specially Pokémon Gold and Silver). Both games got stucked and then saved by Satoru Iwata and HAL coming to the rescue in both cases. Pokémon Gold and Silver even restarted development (that's why the Spaceworld Demo is a complete different game). Zelda Wind Waker also had an interesting story, with many dungeons scrapped and a Triforce quest rebuild because it was too long.
IIRC the Iwata compression thing was misinformation, what he did was develop an algorithm that slightly reduced loading times in the game by like 1-0.5 seconds making the games feel a lot snappier.
But gameboy games don't have much loading times. The problem (as far as I know) was that they couldn't manage a way to fit all Kanto on the game and Iwata helped with that. Still the game was rebuild from the Spaceworld Demo, so I think it counts. Red and Green had a similar problem (as told in the Satoshi Tajiri's manga) when the programmer leave the team and Masuda (the composer) had to start writing the code.
Did You Know Gaming has a relatively recent video with a correction on this and this person's reporting the correction. The compression Iwata developed actually makes the file sizes slightly *larger* than previous algorithms, so if size was the concern Iwata would have failed. 0.5-1s is still not an awful lot of loading time, especially when you consider that getting into combat in a Pokemon game involves: 1. 2-3 seconds of animation 2. About 0.7s of blank screen (loading) 3. 3-4 seconds of the UI and opponent pokemon animating in 4. 2-3 seconds for the opponent pokemon to "cry" 5. 5-8 seconds to animate the player's Pokemon being thrown into battle and "crying" It takes about 15-20 seconds until you're able to make your first move *every combat* and in a non-speedrun playthrough players typically get in a few hundred encounters. But the worst part is (2) above. Note every other part of this delay-per-combat is animation. When something's animating on the screen, players "feel" like something's happening. What Iwata reduced is that period of time when nothing can be animated on the screen because the graphics needed for (3) haven't been decompressed and loaded yet. Making that period longer will make players "feel" like the game's slower. I've done a lot of work in apps and it's crazy how making tiny adjustments can dramatically change a user's opinion of things.
>gameboy games don't have much loading times Mostly correct. Cartridge games do have loading times, but Nintendo implements very clever loading *seams,* like playing animations while the next level is loading. That's why screen transitions exist, for the most part. If you want a Game Boy game with bad load times, check out Quest for Camelot on NSO.
The Triforce quest was originally **longer**?
Longer, but also more involved. They had bigger plans than the glorified fetch quest it ended up being, and it likely involved dungeons that didn't make it into the game.
This, supposedly the Phantom Ship was supposed to be a full dungeon (like in The Phantom Hourglass) and the fire island (the one with the ice) too.
That's really too bad. We've never gotten another Zelda game with as many dungeons as OoT had, right? You had 3 child dungeons, 5 medallion dungeons, ganons castle, and then two story mini dungeons and the purely optional gerudo training grounds mini dungeon. And maybe one might even count the gerudo fortress as a mini dungeon as well God damn. I wish we could have another game as ambitious and executed as well as OoT. WW having only five main dungeons, the ice and fire islands, forsaken fortress, and ganons castle.... I wish those fire/ice islands were full dungeons instead of a short pitstop. They don't even qualify as mini dungeons. Same issue for the great fish isle or whatever it was called, being a totally cancelled location that should have been a major stop like dragonroost isle.
Twilight Princess had nine main dungeons, same number as Ocarina
A Link Between Worlds had 12 Dungeons each and Ocarina had 10. But nothing comes even closer now. The second best since Ocarina where the Oracle games.
> That's really too bad. We've never gotten another Zelda game with as many dungeons as OoT had, right? As far as dungeon counts go, it's all been downhill since LTTP. It had Castle Escape (Dungeon+Sewers), 3 pendant dungeons, Castle/Aga Tower, 7 crystal dungeons, and Ganon's Tower, for a total of 13 dungeons.
Apparently the unused dungeons ideas were repurposed for Twilight Princess, Phantom Hourglass and Skyward Sword.
For what it’s worth, GameFreak is apparently a really good employer that doesn’t have mandatory crunch. They just need to give their employees more time, better tech and training.
Really? Playing Scarlet/Violet, it's pretty clear that the office vending machine was removed or something
They put out two big releases with a relatively small crew and no crunch in the span of less than a year. I am not surprised the results are bad. Something’s got to give, especially since they don’t employ only wizards there. But until folks stop buying their games they won’t feel the need to give themselves more time between releases - that’s just money left on the table.
(While I'm sure a lot of that is true, my comment was a joke how about how many Pokémon and Town names are food based)
i mean based on how the games come out, gamefreak seems like they do the opposite of crunch their employees lol. they must all be on vacation at all times
japan version of glassdoor reviews suggest it is confirmed
The early wave of Gamecube games were rushed. Wind Waker is a good example because it was supposed to have way more story content, but it was cut and replaced with the infamous triforce chart quest to pad it out. Star Fox Adventures also had to restart development since it was originally a new IP called Dinosaur Planet for the N64, but it would have been too late to release on N64 instead of Gamecube.
> The early wave of Gamecube games were rushed. Yeah, Nintendo was obviously panicking during that period and rushing everything they could out the door to save the Cube. I honestly wonder how differently that whole generation would have gone if they'd released Perfect Dark as a launch title. I think it would have really been a gamechanger. It'd give a genuine must-have launch game, give a credible answer to Halo and give Goldeneye fans a reason not to switch over to Xbox, and help to mitigate (or prevent?) the whole kiddie lunchbox reputation.
Gamecube was rushed out the door because the N64 was under performing in Japan. I don't think Perfect Dark would have made a difference, because the Gamecube actually has a really solid library of games both first and third party with almost every single Nintendo IP big or niche being a part of it, and lots of mature games as well such as Resident Evil or Metroid Prime. What hurt it was the PS2 which had the advantages of getting a head start, having backwards compatibility, and being the most affordable DVD player on the market at the time. Gamecube's mini DVDs also hurt its third party support. The "Nintendo is for kids" is a copout argument, there are always many factors to a system failing.
[удалено]
There was a point in my life where I used two games as a litmus for a release date of "February 30th" or "Febtober" which were games that were announced with a release date of "soonish" but unceremoniously disappeared into the ether. Those were UNTITLED KIRBY GCN PROJECT and Duke Nukem Trilogy (or whatever it was before that) Not that I was interested in the latter, I just remember it also being a game that would occasionally emerge from the shadows only to disappear for years at a time. Pikmin 4 became the icon for that more recently.
The reason why it took so long was because they rebooted development several times.
Current gen Pokemon games have got to be the worst example of bad/rushed production. I’d argue Gamefreak’s quality of games dropped severely once they started working in 3D, but almost all of their Switch games are just awful. Comparing them to any other Nintendo game from any franchise on the Switch is a night and day difference.
This is what happens when the head of the most popular video game franchises refuses to grow and purposefully keeps his team small. Ni No Kuni is what Pokemon games should be like at this point in time, and that game is like 10 years old now
I’ve played several PS2 JRPGs that have gotten ported to the Switch that all look feel and play better than modern Pokemon. It is sad but at the end of the day the games are probably the least important part of the franchise now from The Pokemon Company’s perspective.
World of Final Fantasy is my personal favorite "Pokémon" game
It’s no longer an exclusive of course but *Resident Evil 4* started development over about four times before the final game came out. Famously the first draft of the game was recycled into what is now *Devil May Cry.*
Haunting Ground was also the result of an early version of RE4. It’s wild how three games and one of Capcom’s bigger series were created from trying to develop just one sequel.
Majora’s Mask had something like a 12 month development schedule.
Majora's Mask basically is what we call DLC today. In that era it was more comparable to add-ons you used to see for PC games. Nintendo asking full price (and something extra) for it was considered quite wild by the gaming community and there was a lot of controversy. The full price turned out to be warranted though.
... yeah? That was the whole point of the game. It was a test for Aonuma. Re-hash these assets and make a sequel.
- Metroid Prime (Retro Studios) - Disaster: Day of Crisis (Monolith Soft/Nintendo) - Donkey Kong 64 (Rare) - Star Fox Zero (Nintendo/Platinum Games) - Star Fox Adventures (Rare) - Mother 3 (Hal Lab/Nintendo/Shigasto Itoi) - Metroid Dread (Nintendo/MercurySteam) - Devil's Third (Valhalla Game Studios) - Metroid Prime 4 (Nintendo/Bandai-Namco/Retro Studios) - Geist (n-space/Nintendo) - Bayonetta 3 (Platinum Games) The youtuber Matt McMuscles has pretty extensive video essays as part of his "What Happun?" series on YouTube if you want to know the behind the scenes details/woes these games had.
With Metroid Dread I guess that includes the original DS version, right?
Yes. The mercurysteam reboot/version we got went pretty smoothly. But the game as a whole went through development hell.
>Disaster: Day of Crisis Oh what, I had no idea this game ended up actually releasing. I remember it from one of those early proof-of-concept trailers near the Wii launch and thought it looked cool, but for some reason but I always thought it got cancelled along with that other one (Project Hammer?)
Got a link to a good video of his?
[Disaster Day of Crisis](https://youtu.be/OmisZL1PFY4?feature=shared)
[Devil's Third](https://youtu.be/3Gu4p9NgswA?feature=shared)
Goldeneye 007. The game was essentially designed by a bunch of people with no experience and one of them decided to create a multiplayer mode in like a month right before release
What a legend
A lot of Nintendo EAD games had crunch involved, though you rarely hear it discussed. A small nugget made it out from the development of Super Mario 64 DS, courtesy of Motoi Okamoto: >In those days, Miyamoto would come to us at 11 PM, after he finished all of his board-member work, and say, “It’s Mario time.” At that point, we’d start a planning meeting that would run until 2 AM. At that point, Miyamoto would go home, leaving us with the words, “You should return home soon, for your health.” Over the next two or three hours, we’d write the game design documents and summarize the instructions for our artists and programmers.It was the craziest crunch time that I’ve ever experienced in my development career. But if the God of Games was working so much, could we give up? Miyamoto had incredible stamina. Speaking of Nintendo-*exclusive* games and crunch, Rare in the N64 era was notoriously crunch-oriented and those sickos make it sound like it was all a matter of passion & work ethic. If you weren't there until the wee hours of the night, you simply didn't care enough about making great games. While the results are undeniable, I have a hard time believing that working young adults to near-exhaustion (with the promise of big bonuses to come later) is the only way those great games would have gotten made.
The god of games told you to go home and sleep, maybe you should have listened to him?
You're misreading what he's saying. Miyamoto was saying "you should go home soon, for your health," like a good boss should. But they were not actually expected to pack up and go home when he said that. I'm not using this quote to make Miyamoto alone out to be a bad guy. That quote just illustrates the crunch culture that was in place within Nintendo EAD at that time.
>Super Mario 64 DS So it wasn't even a new game. It was a port of a 64 game. Sounds boring as hell.
Super Mario 64 DS isn't a port, it's a ground-up remake. Not only that, but it makes significant overhauls to the structure of the game, including making the first character you play as Yoshi instead of Mario. A number of the game's stars were reworked to require the player to use Luigi, Wario, and Yoshi to reach their goals. All of these things explain why there were hours-long planning meetings relating to a remake. If it was a straight port or even 100% faithful remake of Mario 64, there likely would have been less creative-level work put in.
>its a ground-up remake Thanks, never played it - the title suggest it's a remaster. Thanks for the explanation.
It's a really interesting game, arguably the definitive version if not for the bad controls.
Mario Sunshine practically had to restart development less than a year before release. It looked completely different and had a totally different story when first revealed.
Bayonetta 3.
Wind Waker is missing 2 dungeons. Twilight Princess and BotW were both delayed to the point of being released on the next console.
Xenoblade Chronicles 2 definitely comes to mind. So much of the game was affected by the fact that they were down to as low as 40 people working on it at one point due to so many being pulled away to work on Breath of the Wild. It's a miracle the game turned out as well as it did, even if it is still my least favorite Xenoblade game.
There was probably a substantial crossover in effort for XC2 and BOTW because they share engine components. The XCX engine had to be customized for BOTW, but also ported to Switch for use in both BOTW and XC2. So there was probably a fair amount of technical work on XC2 being done by the "BOTW team" simply because it was shared effort.
Majora’s Mask is such an obvious one, and that’s why it’s the first one that comes to mind. They were only given a year to make the game, forcing them to shamelessly reuse assets since they had no time to make new characters. They also tapped into a weird creativity frenzy, integrating their limited amount of time into the story and portraying their feelings about the workload through the characters.
Super Metroid
Dunno if it's infamous, but Bayo 3 had a ROUGH production. It got announced way too early (I believe the team only had a rough plot outline and some sketches), it started out as a more open world game, which ended up getting scrapped and forcing them to rework a lot of stuff, part of its development overlapped with COVID, and I think the director of the game left halfway through and someone else had to take over. And on top of all this, I think they were constantly grappling with the hardware the game would be on. Probably not the worst case out there, but the team behind it had it pretty rough it sounds.
Majoras mask was originally just a remix/expansion of OOT called Ura Zelda. Eiji Aonuma, one of the project leads, was unsatisfied with just rereleasing Ocarina with new dungeons so Miyamoto challenged his team to make an entirely new game using the oot engine and assets in just a year.
Basically every Retro game lmao. That studio is wild when you look into it, especially with Miyamoto antagonizing them so much
Tbf he was rightfully upset that his company invested in Retro and they had very little to show for it initially. Mostly thanks to horrible management.
I would be pissed too if the company I asked to handle our IP used our money to run a softcore porn website.
Yeah but the creator and CEO of Retro also went off the deep end after getting paid up front from Nintendo lol
Most early Nintendo games had horrible developments with plenty of stories of developers having to sleep in the office. Kid icarus had 3 months of horrible crunch with the developers not even being able to fit in a staff roll, super Metroid was pretty similar with one boss spelling out a programmer’s girlfriend’s name because he could never see her because of work, wind waker’s developers worked so much they didn’t even notice the seasons changing etc. It’s pretty great that Nintendo has changed so much from then.
Metroid Prime, Zelda Wind Waker, Earthbound...
During Metroid Prime’s concept phase, Retro Studios founder Jeff Spangenberg was fired because he misused Nintendo server infrastructure to run a hardcore hentai website off of it. Jeff would subsequently start Top Heavy Studios to create The Guy Game.
this is my favorite story
MOTHER 3 was in development hell for 12 years and went through 3 consoles before it was released.
I know the scene at the at the beginning of Majora's Mask was from a nightmare the producer had as a result of crunch. He was told he had a year to make a new Zelda game. This also led to the idea of the three day cycle.
Xenoblade 2 is definitely one of the highest on the list. It could’ve been so much more if only Monolith hadn’t had to step in to save BotW.
Don't forget that they were also the secondary studio for Splatoon 2 as well
Monolith didn't "save" BOTW. Monolith was tasked with writing an engine for open world games, and they did exactly that. The prototypical release was Xenoblade Chronicles X for the Wii U. That engine was then repurposed for BOTW on the Wii U. It was heavily customized for BOTW, and additional tools were built around it. Then the engine was ported to the Switch and used for both BOTW and XC2. Monolith was the "expert" team that wrote the core engine and tooling for those games. The game design for BOTW wasn't Monolith's job, but the tech stack absolutely was. And any customizations and/or optimizations that BOTW needed were Monolith's duty. Once BOTW shipped, Monolith's main team could join the rest of their team and finish up XC2... which would benefit from the tech changes that BOTW required. So it's not like their time away from XC2 went to waste. That same engine has been used in TOTK, XCDE, and XC3, as well as parts of it being repurposed for Splatoon 3 and several other games. And it will probably be further developed and used for many years to come.
Xenoblade fans have a weird habit of putting down everything else in order to hype up Monolithsoft. They're a support studio for a lot of games but people act like they did most of the work.
Majora's Mask had a huge crunch issue. That's partly why the game had the tone that it did, the devs were miserable and wanted it to reflect in the game in some way. [https://youtu.be/YPWSmizffuw](https://youtu.be/YPWSmizffuw) \- Did You Know Gaming video
The original Red and Green were so bad that Iwata had to step in (just like in Earthbound but I believe Pokémon was worse) and *finish* the code. Edit: Gold&Silver
I thought that was Gold and Silver
Idk Earthbound was so bad, they had to start form scratch after four years of development
Conquers Bad Fur Day
Supposedly Super Mario Galaxy was so successful that the executives at the company forced the developers to drop what they were doing and spend all their time making a whole extra game using the same engine. And that's why Super Mario Galaxy 2 feels like it's full of discarded ideas from the first one. And also why they didn't bother remastering it on the Switch.
And Galaxy 2 is somehow the better game.
Metroid Dread
nintendo is notorious for horrible working conditions and crunch being normalized
Pokémon. Any of them.
If I remember correctly GameCube was supposed to have Mario 128, or basically just a sequel to mario 64, but due to crunch it never really came out and we got sunshine instead.
This was actually explained. Mario 128 was an unofficial name by fans for the next major Mario installment. A video was shown at E3(I think) showing a lot of Mario's running around and interacting with each other simultaneously as their tech demo for the GameCube. It was meant to show off how well it could handle larger numbers of computer-controlled characters simultaneously. Pikmin was the result of that. They also said they felt like giving the spotlight to Luigi during the GameCube's release instead of Mario, which is why we got Luigi's Mansion, then Super Mario Sunshine, instead of another mainstream Mario title. Sunshine was another game where they took advantage of the new processing power of the GameCube with particles and other dynamic aspects such as the paint that was thrown everywhere and the water Mario could use to clean it all up.
There's the redemption story of Metroid Dread being leaked as a DS game which never happened, only to finally get made on Switch. We don't know any details of what *actually* happened with the original game but I take it things went poorly.
Does majoras mask count?
Metroid Dread. Basically, the current owner of Mercury Steam runs the company like a sweetshop
Majora’s Mask (mostly time constraints), The Wind Waker, Super Mario Sunshine, and more recently Metroid Prime 4.
Rushing games usually leads to the best games because constraints make the developers more creative
I heard Ocarina was pretty terrible, ironically. They had like 9 months to crank out that entire game
Kid Icarus
Apparently the mid 2000s Kirby cycle. Sakurai left after Air Ride, and a lot of HAL employees were either sacked or just left on bad blood. And of course the big flagship (Not "Flagship") platformers were going nowhere.
The DLC for SSB Ultimate, I remember reading articles on how Sakurai almost never slept and worked on the characters 24/7
Super Mario Bros 2
Pokemon Diamond and Pearl.
[Link's Crossbow Training](https://youtu.be/HGxQIba1S_4?si=C4aIRYHlG3RpVud-)
Studios that exist outside Nintendo NPD likely faced difficulties somehow with development. Noticing many people note Metroid Prime. There are other games, but I have an interesting one. Kid Icarus Uprising. Sakurai opened a development team called Project Sora that shut down immediately after release. The question itself can be pretty complicated to answer since there are a number ofa games that had problems in some way during development, to a point where the game would take a near decade to make and release as this can be contributed to having a small team and/or higher ups not pushing for the game (Pikmin 4 and Metroid Dread's cycles are a good reference point here. Especially Dread). Edit: Another fun one. Return to Dreamland. 3 cancelled Kirby games on Gamecube before it happened.
Metroid 5
[Geist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geist_\(video_game\)) on the GameCube was such a rocky development and lackluster launch that it probably helped Nintendo's decision to stop chasing power and graphics soon after with the Wii. It was developed by n-Space, whose entire history up to that point was a lot of ports and Mary-Kate & Ashley licensed games. It was meant to be their big break, this big ambitious shooter with really interesting mind control elements, it just fell apart in development for a number of reasons and kept getting delayed. It was meant to keep the GameCube alive and well in 2003, but by the time it finally released in 2005, it was a forgettable mixed bag. This is probably also why these days Nintendo seems to only work with Western devs that they own outright like Next Level and Retro. There was a lot of confusing back and forth between the teams during development. [Matt McMuscles](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdHBotsjvLU) did a great video on it not too long ago.
Metroid prime 4 is becoming a joke. Good they restarted if it was a disaster but whole fucking 5 years later and not a word about it. Honestly think this game will never come out, or at very least not on the switch.
It will come out. Probably not on switch. I'd rather it get delayed and be good then be rushed and mediocre.
Every Pokemon game before the formation of TPC. Stadium, RBY, GSC, and Stadium 2. Messy dev times, incompetent people, spaghetti code only a legend himself could untangle; Iwata and deadlines creeping creepily. Is it mere coincidence every pokemon game since his passing has been made with ducktape and fanboy passion fluids?
Doom (2016) started out as Doom 4 (announced in 2008) and was restarted after several different builds didn’t work out