Hi there! So in the world of search, there is but one
ruler - Google. And back in the late 2000s, I think it could
be argued that Nintendo was resigning over gaming, what with the extreme success the
Wii was enjoying. But, you may not know that the two companies
actually partnered up to develop this weird game called “And-Kensaku”, which means
“and search”. It was a game all about googling - players
would guess which search term was more popular, build up a staircase using the number of hits
from a search term, and even pass a bomb between players which would explode if they didn’t
have enough search results. Yeah, this game was pretty strange. But stranger still is the story of how it
came to be. So, let us journey through And-Kensaku’s
Development History1 It was early 2007, and developer Kentaro Soya
from development studio Shift was walking down the street one night when out of nowhere,
he was struck by an idea! He imagined a real time strategy game, with
a large search box at the bottom of the screen. The player would type a word into the box,
and a fighter would be created who attacked enemies based on the number of results the
search term returned. When he told this idea to his boss the next
day, his boss responded, “The search hit part is interesting, but the rest isn’t
so much.” Then, he made a suggestion: “It might be
interesting if you make it like bingo”. And so, Soya and his programmer colleague
Youchi Yui starting putting together a bingo based search prototype. And after about 4 months of work, they finished
up what they called “Panel 9”. There was a 3 by 3 grid featuring a variety
of keywords, and players had to combine one of these words with one from their personal
wordbank. The game would then perform an AND search
with these two words, and the number of search results was high enough, the space on the
grid would be claimed by that player. To win, players needed to get a full line,
just like real bingo. Now, after trying out this prototype internally
at Shift, it was immediately clear just how fun this was to play, so the studio decided
to pitch this project to Nintendo. When producer Kentaro Nishimura saw this proposal,
he was instantly drawn to the project, and decided to accept the proposal. When Nintendo president Satoru Iwata heard
of the project, he suggested, “we should probably ask for Google’s advice”. However, he had no idea if Google would be
actually interested in this weird game concept. Nevertheless, Iwata met with Kan from Google,
who was in charge of partnerships with other companies. When Iwata told him about their search game
idea, Kan was at a loss. In his words, “It was completely different
compared with the other partnership work I handle day in and day out.” If Kan was to accept this partnership, he
would face two problems. Firstly, it had nothing to do with his main
work, so some people at Google wouldn’t be keen for the engineers to spend their time
on the project. Secondly, the game needed an accurate number
of search results. That sounds easy enough, but Google weren’t
focused on the number of search results found - what they cared about was the quality of
search results found. Luckily for Nintendo, many of the employees
at Google Japan were big fans of the Wii, so they resolved to overcome any problems
they might face. And so, Google accepted Nintendo’s proposal. With that decided, it was time for Shift to
start fleshing out their prototype into a full game. First off, they decided to add in some sort
of mascot character, taking the form of a cube-headed robot. Since their prototype was based around “AND”
searches, they named the robot “Andou Kensaku”, which is a play on the Japanese for “AND
search”. Now, around this time, Nishimura, Shift’s
producer at Nintendo, came to the team with a concern he had. Their prototype had been great fun in a multiplayer
setting, but would it be any good as a single player game? He told Shift, “We’d like you to add about
ten more modes”. Ten more modes! Over the summer, the developers focused on
coming up with as many different ideas as possible. However, at first, they didn’t have much
luck. Since all the modes were based around actual
data from Google, the numbers they had to use varied massively. That made it difficult to create carefully
honed experiences - too much was out of the hands of the developers. And from there, things only got worse. While testing the bingo, Panel 9, a problem
began to emerge. Since the search terms were randomly chosen,
sometimes you’d get a logical combination like “car” and “driving”, but sometimes
you’d get something that didn’t make any sense, like “car” and “swimming”. When testers tried out the game, they responded,
“It’s like playing the lottery, you have to leave it all up to luck.” Oh dear, that’s not what the team wanted
to hear. How could they make sure that all the word
combinations made sense together? Their solution was to go through all 4000
words, and manually sort them into groups. They had 30 to 40 staff members going through
the list and grouping the words, but still, this didn’t feel right. It was too subjective - what one staff member
thought paired well with a certain word might seem totally wrong to a different staff member. Luckily, it was at that time that the team
stumbled across a programmer who specialised in Japanese language processing. He wrote a program that would look at how
likely certain groups were to be searched for together, and put them into groups based
on that. This snazzy little algorithm allowed the team
to add another 6000 words to the game, totalling 10,000! Phew, now development was going smoothly again! There’s no way another, even worse problem
could be right around the corner, right? Hahahaha... Their game was postponed indefinitely. Okay okay okay, let’s back up a second. So Nishimura had been talking with Iwata about
potential titles for the game. But no matter what he suggested, Iwata turned
them all down. None of them seemed attention grabbing or
exciting enough. According to Iwata, “In my tenure as CEO
no other game has had its name rejected so many times.” As he and Nishimura were going back and forth,
they started to think that perhaps the reason why they couldn’t think up a good title
was that the game itself wasn’t very easy to understand. Despite all the new modes, Nishimura was still
hearing feedback that the single player wasn’t much fun, and many people didn’t really
understand the idea of AND searches. Nishimura and Iwata asked themselves, “Is
it really okay for us to put this game out as it is?” And so, it was decided that development would
be put on hold. When Shift were told this, they were shocked. It was like the rug had just been pulled out
from underneath them. Not to be beaten, the developers started thinking
up ways to make the game more understandable. The first idea they came up with was swapping
out AND search with phrase search. You see, with AND search, if you searched
for Queen Elizabeth on Google, it would return any pages with either Queen or Elizabeth in
them - you’d be bombarded by results about the 70’s band and my gran. However, with phrase search, you’d only
get results with both of those words - in this case, her majesty the Queen. The team thought that phrase search would
be simpler to understand to players, especially to those who hadn’t really used Google much
before, but switching over would require a lot of major changes. For example, they had a game mode called “Which
is higher?”, which presented the player with 2 search terms and they had to guess
which one returned more results. However, if they were using phrase search,
they would have to find a way to come up with a variety of interesting questions featuring
phrases. Eventually, they decided to write all of the
questions manually. Shift hired a bunch of TV quiz show question
writers, and only used questions involving puns, double meanings, regional differences
- unexpected or interesting questions. Now, it was around this time that Nishimura
was yet again trying to get a title approved for the game. Eventually, he stumbled upon the idea of naming
the game after the robot character, “Andou Kensaku”. And, Iwata approved this name! Without hesitation, Nishimura phoned up Shift
to tell them the good news. Hearing cheering from the other end of the
line, he knew that they had taken the news well. And so, on the 29th of April 2010, And Kensaku
was released! Development had lasted for 3 years, far far
longer than any of the developers had expected, but they had ended up with a final product
that they were really proud of. And that’s the story of that time Nintendo
made a game about googling. I hope you found that interesting, and subscribe
for more videos like these. Plus, if you know someone who would find this
video interesting, sharing it with them is a huge help to me! Right, I'll see you next week. Bye!
What the video creator was describing as an "AND" search seemed to be an OR search to me...
Weird.
Interesting how Funhaus plays Google Trends as a game. I wonder if they know about this game.
Port this to the Switch now
Oh so that’s what the Smash Bros. Ultimate spirit is
I have this game! It's weird!
I bet this would be especially fun for a Westerner – you get to guess at what Japan was googling in 2010.
That honestly sounds like it could be a dope mobile game
Isnt this just google feud?