Nintendo is an unbelievably stubborn company. They are a company willing to take huge risks,
a company willing to ignore all design trends of the current time and to go into the opposite
direction, a company willing to reboot their most important franchises over and over again. Basically they are a company that was and
still is sometimes nuts enough to take a huge risk, to throw all proven to work concepts
into the bin, only to start again from scratch. And sometimes those huge risks turned out
to be insanely influential. Sometimes those risks that not only lead to
tremendous successes for Nintendo, but even changed the way we think about games in its
entirety. Oh Uhm … Hello, everybody, it’s so nice
to meet all of you again, you still look amazing! Uhm .. so our second little gathering. So second gatherings are always a bit weird
aren’t they, like you know. The first gathering everyone is always doing
their best and only showing off their cookie side, and then the second gathering comes
and that is when you realize that they aren’t as funny as you thought they were, and that
they never actually read the book they told you so much about, and that their shower is
broken, and that they apparently can’t stop to goof around about their pan, even though
the joke was only mildly amusing the first time, and that they have way more cats than
any person reasonably should have. You know, it happens. Oh yeah, nintendo’s most brilliant design
decisions. As good audio ceave already said, today we
are going to talk about five brilliant decisions that Nintendo made over the past 40 years
that were huge and monumentally influential on the whole industrie. Decisions that shaped gaming as we know it. Decisions that were huge and great and fantastic
and important and good. I’m obviously running low on superlatives,
so are you ready? Let’s do this! Allright, so in order to find out why our
first genius decision is so genius we have to enter a time capsule and pretend that we
are at the beginning of the eighties for a second. So there is a ravaging HIV pandemic going
on, the current president is best known for his television career, but completely fails
to act in response to the out of control aids pandemic, there are tensions between russia
and the US, america's war on drugs is working flawlessly for the drugs and everyone is running
around with a rubik's cube. I know, hard to imagine nowadays. *throws cube away*
Anyway. So at the beginning of the eighties there
is a home console gold rush. Analysts expect the market to grow with insane
speed, companies like atari are expanding rapidly, tons of new players enter the market
and suddenly there is a gigantic crash. The famous video game crash of 1983. The market implodes, home consoles are suddenly
seen as toxic. No one wants to enter the market, everyone
is convinced that home consoles are dead. Everyone but this weird japanese company that
just had a runaway success with this odd arcade game where a carpenter called jumpman had
to fight against a giant ape. At the moment when video gaming was at its
lowest, nintendo is the only company brave enough to release a home console. No one else does so, for years, and the NES
ended up being a huge success. Nintendo is not only the first really successful
company to sell gaming consoles, but they are without competition. They are in a position to define gaming all
on their own. So the story of how Nintendo saved the home
console market is a really interesting one, and definitely one of their prouder moments,
but that’s actually not what I want to talk about. Because the really influential design decision
that I actually want to talk about happened a year prior to the market even crashing. It happened in 1982, or to be more precise,
it happened in 1982 donkey kong game and watch game. Because 1982s donkey kong game and watch probably
set the basic layout for every controller of every major console up until today. That’s totally a real Donkey Kong game. Wooooooooopfff. So there are certain things that we nowadays
take for absolutely granted with gaming controllers. The way we move a character is on the left,
the main buttons with which we interact with the game are on the right, the right joystick
controls the camera, aiming is usually mapped to a shoulder button and so on. The switch pro controller, the X-BOX controller,
the PS5 controller, they all basically feature the same buttons, that basically every game
uses for the exact same things. We all have gotten used to this controller
layout, and to the conventions on how the buttons are used. You know, no one releases a game where the
left joystick controls the camera and the right one is used for moving around. Okay so let’s hop back in our time capsule
and let’s take a look at what controllers looked like leading up to the huge video game
crash of 1983. It’s total controller anarchy. Every console came with completely different
controllers. The most successful console at this point
in time, the atari 2600 featured this controller that only consisted of a joystick, that was
able to move into four directions, and a single lonely button, the famous, the … , what
is it called again? *reads paper* The famous magnavox odyssey
famous for being the world's first home console featured two paddles with two dials, there
were those weird Color TV-Game mini consoles that only came with a pre installed set of
games. That either also featured two paddles with
dials or two detachable dials. Those are so weird, I wonder who built those
again, *looks at notes* *turns notes* Nintendo. Oh. So basically there is no standard for how
games control. Which finally leads us to Nintendo's first
most genious decision and back to the donkey kong game and watch because this little and
uninspicious title, is actually the first game that is controlled with a d-pad. So this little D-pad actually managed to make
quite the career, since basically every controller of every major company uses an ancestor of
this little d-pad. Until today. When Nintendo set out to design the controller
for the famicom they realized that the D-Pad design for the donkey kong game was actually
the perfect way to control games in two dimensions, so they decided to use it for the famicom. At the time the Famicom releases there is
basically no competition in the market, so the NES controller is the controller that
ends up setting in stone the most basic conventions of how controllers look like. There is a d-pad on the left of the controller,
and there are buttons to the right. It’s actually kind of funny if you think
about it, but if the designers at nintendo were to decide that the d-pad is on the right
side of the game and watch then that would probably also mean that the d-pad would be
on the right sight of the famicom controller, which would probably mean that all companies
going forward would have copied this design which would probably mean that all controllers
nowadays would be mirrored. You know that’s the kind of stuff I like
to think about all day. Leave me a comment telling me what kind of
stuff you like to think about all day down in the comm … *laughs*. Anyway that’s how influential the design
decision of using a d-pad for the donkey kong game and watch ended up being. Which brings us to our next brilliant design
decision. VC: *click* okay so this time we have to travel
to the year 1996. 3D games are booming. The N64 and the ps1 are the first home consoles
that are realistically able to render stunning 3D graphics. But the jump to 3 dimensions also comes with
it’s own unique challenges. Especially for third person games, because
no one has really figured out on how to do cameras in three dimensions yet. The best thing that developers have so far
are tracking cameras. So what are tracking cameras, well tracking
cameras are cameras that are basically glued to the back of the character that we want
to control. We can see such a brilliant tracking camera
in action in 1996s pilot wings, which was a nintendo 64 release title. Basically the camera and the character always
move together. The camera just mimics, our movement and always
shows us the game from exactly behind our character. So here’s the deal with tracking cameras. They are really bad. Like really really bad. They always force us to move our character
when we want to change our view, which, well it just feels horrible. VC: So at the early days of 3D development
certain genres simply were limited by the available camera tech. Platformers for example really suffer if the
camera is glued to the back of our platforming hero of choice and drastically limit the design
space available. The original crash bandicoot for example features
not a single level with free roaming exploration, the camera there is either fixed, or it is
tracking crash. So, tracking cameras are bad for open exploration,
but there aren’t really many other options aside from a couple of experimental games. And then the N64 releases alongside mario
64. And mario 64 is the first major game that
drops the horrible tracking camera and instead features an interactive camera. Mario 64s camera system was revolutionary
for it’s time. Because in Mario 64 the camera is no longer
glued to mario’s back, but instead it intelligently interacts with the terrain. The camera is aware of its surroundings, and
adjusts itself to get the perfect shot of the scene the same way a person would do. Or in this case a camera carrying lakitu. One area where the tremendously intelligent
camera can be seen is at the beginning of thwomps fortress. I am not manipulating the camera here. At first the camera is directly behind us,
but as soon as we come to the stone wubbles that try to kick us to our doom the camera
moves to our right to give us a better view over the scene, but as soon as we reach the
end of the part the camera drastically shifts to show us the path that we probably want
to take. We aren’t controlling the camera in any
way here, the camera is just intelligent enough on it’s own to understand what to show us. Hooray! The decision to implement the camera in this
way in mario 64 ended up being insanely influential. Basically all modern third person games use
a similar system. The camera carrying lakitu in mario 64 might
not have aged that gracefully, but definitely caused an insane legacy, and it is in my humble
opium the second most influential design decision Nintendo ever made. RC: Reads book. Oh, excuse me I didn’t notice you. You know I was just reading this exciting
book. It’s called how to become a youtube star
in 7 days, and it is full of to the point advice about how to run a youtube channel. For example did you know that it really helps
a channel if you, uhm … where did I read this, was it chapter 2? Yeah, here! It really helps if you punch the like button. I think punch is the correct term. Also you should make sure to knock out the
subscribe button as often as you possible can because that really helps with regagement
or something. Also make sure to bit the hell, no uhm to
hit a bell. Whatever that means. That’s apparently really important So sorry
if this is intrusive but the book says that I am supposed to remind you about that towards
the end of the video, forget about what I just said. Oh wow, that was scary. Anyway, back to work. Which video are we shooting again? Is this sunshine? It’s the decisions, you are absolutely sure
it is the decisions because last time you said you were sure you were like, okay the
decisions fine. So nintendo’s seco… third most important
design decision. Let’s stay at the beginning of 3D gaming
for a while. So Mario 64 shaped how cameras work in video
games up until this day, but mario 64 isn’t the only legendary game of this console cycle. Because there is one more universally loved
game from this time that ended up being highly influential. RC: It’s a game about going onto an adventure,
a game about succeeding against all odds, it’s a game about exploration, and about
growth. And you know a game where we learn new abilities
that we find deep down in dungeons locked away. It is an amazing game, one of the best action
adventure games ever made. I'm obviously talking about Konami's Mystical
Ninja starring Goemon. In mystical ninja Goemon and his friends are
tasked to save feudal japan from a dangerous shogun group that plans to turn japan into
a fine western arts theater. On their very important quest the team of
four has to platform over dangerous pits, they have to learn abilities like shrinking,
or mermaidification, they have to find new weapons that allow them to overcome obstacles,
this happens: DASH DASH DASH! Mystical Ninja starring Goemen is an unbelievably
great action adventure game, and it is a game that a lot of you wonderful ladies and gentlemen
probably never heard about, since the game only sold about 50.000 copies in the US. So I actually played the game shortly after
release, and when the game released it honestly was the best action adventure out there. I mean that by the way, it is a truly fascinating
game, and up until this day I have never played anything like it again, but it isn’t without
its flaws. Which brings us back to the actual topic of
this video. Also shoutout to Tarosan from “world of
longplays” who recorded the beautiful footage we are currently watching. So Goemon's problem. It’s its combat system. Combat in Goemon works something like this. We press the attack button, and then there
is a damage state in front of us for a second. If an enemy happens to be inside this damage
zone that our attack spawns then the enemy takes damage. So this type of combat system is typical for
early 3D games, and it is sadly a really bad way of implementing combat in 3D. The huge problem here is that the direction
we move to is tied to the direction we attack to. So if an enemy tries to hit us and we dodge
the attack by walking away, then we not only dodge the attack, but we also change the direction
we would attack to, because, well because movement changes our orientation and our orientation
changes where we attack. A real sword fight just doesn’t look like
this. Or at least I presume that a real sword fight
doesn’t look like this, but honestly, what do I know, I’ve never been in a real sword
fight. Actually I don’t think I even know anyone
who ever was in a real sword fight. So Goemon's combat always ends up feeling
a bit weird, which is typical for games of this era. It took game developers almost an entire console
generation to figure out how to design combat in 3D. The game that really revolutionized how combat
in 3D works got released a year after goemon. And this game is of course ocarina of time. Which brings us to the third most influential
and brilliant design decision Nintendo ever made. The Z targeting in Ocarina of Time. Combat in ocarina of time does not work like
it did in so many games, like mystical ninja, before. Instead of changing our characters orientation
when moving, links orientation gets locked onto an enemy as soon as we hit Z. Link now always faces the enemy, if we press
to the side link does not turn around, but side strafes to the left instead, pressing
back makes Link get more distance to the enemy instead of making him change orientation,
and pressing attack, well attacking will always attack into the direction of the targeted
enemy. So ocarina of time famously turned out to
be quite an impressive game, but the Z targeting ended up to be it’s legacy. At least in my opinion. The God of War reboot, all of the souls games,
pretty much every game that has some kind of a lock on mechanic uses an iterated version
of ocarina of times Z targeting. In my humble opinion, this design ended up
being one of Nintendo's most genius moments. Which brings us to the fourth most important
design decision in Nintendo's history. *click* RC: Okay, so the year is 1995. Yoshi’s Island just released on the super
nintendo, OJ. Simpson just was found to be not guilty, toy story is running in the cinemas,
braveheart wins best picture and … I need a freakin teleprompter I always tell
you I need a freakin teleprompter. Why does nobody get me a freakin teleprompter,
those are so many words, do you know how many words those are? I can’t remember so many words. Someone buy me a freakin teleprompter. .. wins best picture and sony, well sony just
released the playstation 1 and Sega just released the Sega Saturn. So the sega saturn and the playstation 1 are
much more powerful than nintendo's aging super nintendo. Nintendo is about to release a new console
themselves in about a year, but they have to figure out a way to distinguish themselves
from their competitors. So there is a bit of a theme with today's
silly little video, and that is that a surprising amount of my subjective nintendo’s most
brilliant decisions list takes place at a similar time. And that is the beginning of 3D gaming. The switch to 3D just confronted tons and
tons of developers with problems they never encountered before. There was no way to take a look at how other
games solved their camera issues, or at how other teams tackled close combat in three
dimensions, or enemy design, or you know, platforming physics. There was just nothing, no conventions, no
traditions, no best practices, there was just a ton of creativity and tons of problems to
solve. And the way nintendo approaches game design
just really lends itself to them finding genius solutions for exactly such problems. Nintendo usually always puts play first. How something controls, how it feels to interact
with, if it is fun to play it, that’s the stuff Nintendo usually tries to get right
at first, and then they work onwards from there. And this obsession of systems being fun on
their own, is, according to my tiny catspiracy theory, the reason why they were able to make
so many game changing decisions in such a short time frame during the shift to 3D gaming. They didn’t just glue a camera to the back
of mario just because it is the easiest way to solve the problem, they actually spent
hours ogver hours thinking about different ways how a camera could work until they came
up with the design that is used in mario 64, they didn’t just spawn a damage area in
front of link once he swings his sword and called it a day, but they actually really
thought about how a sword fight looks like in real life, and tinkered with ways to emulate
this until they had the Z targeting, they didn’t simply copy the controller design
of the SNES, a design they invented in the first place and a controller design that everyone
in the industry was copying at this point, but they sat down and tried to really think
about the best way of inputting movement in 3 dimensions, and the solution they came up
with looked drastically different then the old SNES controller. Which leads us to Nintendo's fourth brilliant
design decision that ended up being insanely influential. The joystick gamble. So that’s something that is often forgotten
nowadays, but the sega saturn, and more importantly the playstation 1 both released with controllers
that did not feature a joystick. Both simply copied the button layout of the
snes controller. You know, a d-pad on the left, some shoulder
buttons, a bunch of buttons on the right and one or two in the middle. It’s the layout Nintendo established first
with the donkey kong game and watch and later with the nes and super nintendo controllers. They just copied this layout because it obviously
worked great so far, without understanding that 3D games are going to require totally
different forms of input. Nintendo on the other hand was willing to
really look into this, and came to the conclusion that a 360 degree joystick is the best way
to input movement in a three dimensional space. That was obviously the right call, but back
in the day no one knew this. The Joystick was actually a huge gamble, a
gamble that paid off. The joystick turned out to be the future. Sony had to react almost immediately by releasing
the dual shock, a controller that featured not only one but two joysticks. One of the times where Sony actually set the
standard for the whole industry. Also sega released this beautifully shaped
controller as an answer to nintendo's joystick gamble. So, no one knows what would have happened
if nintendo wouldn’t have been willing to take a risk with the N64 controller, but there
is a decent chance that joysticks wouldn't have been much more than gimmicks for the
entirety of the first 3D console generation. Who knows how controllers nowadays would look
like if Nintendo didn’t decide to roll with the N64 controller. A decision that ended up being insanely influential. *click* RC: *Reads book.* So here it says that I have
to share at least one personal detail with you per video because it helps with para normal
relationship building. Cool. So, I actually read that a couple of days
ago, and I was like what to tell you what to tell you. You know my life honestly isn’t that exciting,
there isn’t that much going on. So, a couple of days ago I was sitting together
with a couple of friends of mine and we were drinking like the fifth bottle of … uhm
.... milk. So I asked them if they have any idea on what
to share with you and they were like. I don’t know ceave, a personal detail? Why don’t you tell them a story about your
teenage days and I was like I’m running a family friendly channel and they were like
oh that’s a problem, and I was like maybe I could tell them something about my favorite
football team but they were like ceave, I hate to break that to you, but half of your
audience lives in the states, they believe that football is played with a banana shaped
ball and I was like yeah you are right, they don’t care. And then somebody was like maybe you want
to tell them something about your favorite animal, and I was like, my favorite animal? Wow, that’s kinda lame but I guess it works. So, uhm, my favorite animals are meerkats. Meerkats are amazing. Did you know that meerkats eat insects, lizards,
snakes, scorpions, plants, eggs, small mammals, centipedes and funghi. Meerkats are actually so badass that they
are immune to certain types of snake and scorpion venom. Meerkats are truly the fuzzies of animals. So truth be told … It’s probably time
to come clear about this. I have been lying to you, throughout all of
the video. This book isn’t actually about becoming
a youtuber in seven days. It’s actually about schweitzer verfassungsrecht. Which uhm, which translates to switzer constitutional
law. It’s the first part. The first part is really great, great book,
second part was also great but inmy honest opinion the series took a turn for the worse
with book 3. The reason we are having a schwizer verfassungsrechts
buch in the video today. looking at uhm, it’s because it was the
thickest book I found in the library. Anyway, so what were we talking about again? Alright nintendo's final most brilliant decision! VC: So let’s do that quick. It’s the legend of zelda Wind waker! Actually no, it’s mario odyssey, no it’s
3D land, no it’s Breath of the wild, no it’s super mario world, or skyward sword,
mario galaxy, or the original super mario bros, or ocarina of time,or it’s super mario
sunshine, or a link to the past or … well actually it’s all of the above. The one thing that I find the most impressive
not only about historic, but also about present nintendo is their willingness to reinvent
the zelda and mario franchise. Especially with the 3D entries. After “ocarina of time” Nintendo had a
3D Zelda blueprint ready. They could have gone ahead and release an
Ocarina of Time like Zelda every couple of years from then on. But they did not. Instead we got Majora's mask, which is a fascinating
little game, and brutally different to Ocarina of time. It’s still undoubtedly a zelda game, but
it is a different kind of zelda experience. Wind waker drastically changed the artstyle,
Nintendo actually got a ton of backlash when they revealed the game for the first time,
but they did it anyway. Since then every major zelda game has had
an entirely different art direction. With breath of the wild they not only changed
the art style, they also completely shook up the zelda formula, aaand they actually
revolutionized the way open world games are designed. After Mario 64 Nintendo did not put Mario
into another castle for the sequel, where he had to explore another 15 paintings, but
they gave him a speaking water jetpack, and had the game take place on a tropical island. For galaxy they scrapped all of this, drastically
changed how mario controls, and had the game take place on weird plantoids, before they
tried something more along the lines of 2D but in 3D with mario land before they went
into another direction and had mario go onto an greek odyssey around the whole planet. I don’t know any other game developer that
is willing to make such drastic changes to an established and beloved franchise. Like the next elder scrolls isn’t suddenly
going to be cell shaded, dark souls 4 isn’t going to take place on weird shaped planetoids,
the next GTA isn’t going to take place in the middle of a gigantic ocean and kratos
won’t have a speaking water jetpack in the next god of war game. The point here is that almost no franchise
is taking more risks than it has to. You know, if a publisher ends up having a
working formula then they usually iterate upon it until the franchise starts to feel
unbearably stale, only then they shake things up a bittle lit, but usually also only as
little as absolutely necessary. It’s just much more in the interest of a
shareholder driven company to repeat what worked once every year but this time ten percent
bigger and 12 percent prettier instead of taking huge risks, that may end up really
paying off. Nintendo is really unique about this. They always start from blank when designing
a sequel for their two most iconic franchises. This not only led to them making many of the
best games ever, but it also means that with each new game there's a chance that nintendo
completely blows it out of the water, completely revolutionizing certain design paradigms. Like they just did with breath of the wild. It’s this thing that I personally always
found to be the most impressive thing about nintendo. Their willingness to start from zero for sequels. RC: So here we have it. *raises pan* In my humble opinion nintendo's
most brilliant and influential decisions are the d-pad since it set the standard for all
controllers nowadays, the camera in mario 64 since it set the standard for almost all
modern camera systems, the z targeting in ocarina of time since almost all modern third
person combat systems iterate upon it, the joystick gamble because joysticks and the
decision to start from scratch for every sequel, since it leads to them being a constant force
of innovation in an AAA industry that would otherwise be really stale. Hooooray. VC: So I hope everyone enjoyed today's little
gathering, if you did, don’t forget to punch the like button and maybe you feel especially
today, and want to knock out the subscribe button as well. Don’t forget to hit me a comment, share
the bell and click the engagement. I hope all of you have a wonderful day, and
too see you soon. Goodbye!
