Gaming News After 40 years, this mystery about the creator of Mario and Zelda has finally been solved!
Video games are full of urban legends and sometimes take years to erase from the collective subconscious. As the saying goes, adopted ideas die hard, but it is another legend that we must shelve a priori.
Nintendo, a publisher in itself
For decades, Nintendo has been known as the Japanese company that never plays by the rules of competition. In general, it is more their ideas that are copied by others, and you only have to read the interviews with the developers of the Kyoto company to be convinced of this. Nintendo has a corporate culture that seems a little out of date, but this difference means that the works that come out of its studios often have a unique charm and, above all, incredible ingenuity. Just play a few levels of Super Mario Bros. I wonder if I understand that its creators definitely have something special. It must be said that unlike many other studios suffering from crises, Nintendo takes a very different approach towards its employees.
Although games are subject to schedules, developers are not under the same pressure as designers at some Western studios. It can of course exist, but you should know that for a game like Super Mario Wonder there was no time limit at all and at the same time Nintendo was careful to offer a budget that suited the character. Apparently the developers had carte blanche, which gives this title an insane amount of generosity. And when we talk to you about it, it’s because it fits Nintendo’s philosophy pretty well.
The cult quote demystified?
Throughout the history of video games, Nintendo has always been considered an independent publisher and Shigeru Miyamoto, Mario’s father, has often had to make statements behind the scenes at the company. The following quote has been attributed to him for several decades: “ A delayed game will end up being good, but a bad game is still a bad game.
The first reference to this quote actually dates back to a poster found on Usenet in 1998, and those interested were even traced back to one Siobhan Beeman, then a project manager at Origin, who confirmed to them… that it was her, during a talk on the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in 1996, which created the following: “ A game is available late when it ships, but it remains crap forever. » While the phrase seems familiar, it was apparently Origin’s motto and was repeated by several people, including the producer of GT Interactive and one Ellen Guon (who supposedly picked it up from her husband). It ended up passing through the years without anyone really getting upset about it, and Shigeru Miyamoto himself may not have been aware of it. The bottom line is that Ellen Guon changed her name and became Siobhan Beeman! If you resort to this, the Critical Hit site (no small investigation, as you can see here) had the answer. The case is therefore resolved pending a hypothetical new investigation.
