
Nintendo’s Philosophy: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology (2015) - michaelpinto
https://medium.com/@adamagb/nintendo-s-little-known-product-philosophy-lateral-thinking-with-withered-technology-bac7257d8f4
======
bane
I think it's important to also understand that, despite broad name
recognition, Nintendo isn't a _huge_ company in the way that Sony or Microsoft
is. Their entire corporate revenue for 2019 was about $11b USD with about
$2.3b USD in operating income. We regularly talk about startups here that are
technically larger.

What Nintendo's philosophy boils down to in terms of business strategy is
using the fact that they are smaller and more nimble to allow creative
solutions to make it to market. We see the exact opposite from Microsoft/Sony
where their strategy is pushing the highest possible technology they can get
to consumers at a reasonable price, and their solutions are virtually
interchangeable with fairly minor differences in overall tech.

While Microsoft and Sony's revenues per platform are around the same, their
console businesses are small pieces of _very_ large organizations -- with all
the ossification that comes from being huge companies.

It's also helpful that culturally Nintendo is a toy company, and thinks about
the platforms and games (and toys) they create in terms of principles of play
vs. electronic experiences. You can really tell this in their games, where
each game feels like an integrated toy system with figures, playsets, very
light stories, and a fair amount of open ended play (within the rules of the
"toy"). Nintendo's focus is on how to create this play experience, and what's
the right amount of technology needed for it instead of launching a rocket
into orbit so that I can mow my lawn in the dark.

~~~
danudey
There have also been interviews where they've talked about how they won't do
something unless they can add something new to it. For example, they haven't
created a new F-Zero game because no one has really come up with anything to
add to F-Zero to make a compelling game, rather than just "It's another F-Zero
game".

In I think the same interview, it was discussed that they won't make a game
unless it's fun if it's just geometric shapes or basic sprites. The idea there
being that a Mario game isn't fun just because it has Mario in it, but if the
gameplay is solid then it will be fun despite not having Mario in it.
Presumably this also lets them crank out prototypes without having to worry
about spinning up art assets to give testers context.

~~~
odessacubbage
tbh that's probably just a polite way of saying they wont do a new one because
ax was a highly expensive commercial failure. there have been 6 mario kart
sequels since gx that all broadly fall into the category of 'just another
mario kart'

~~~
hitekker
I'd disagree on the Mario Kart example. The core mechanics of that series have
stayed roughly the same, but the little additions have created a different,
deeper experience:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3oz5uth_90](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3oz5uth_90)

It feels beautiful.

------
taneq
"Withered" is a really weird word to use here since all of these old-and-cheap
parts are cheap only because they're massively widely used. I think a better
translation would be "commodity parts".

In fact later in the article it says "This was a poor translation of the
original, which was much closer in spirit to ‘weathered.’" It seems to me that
the use of the term in the headline was deliberately obfuscating clickbait. :/

That said, I always love seeing the ways that Nintendo manages to think
outside the box and do genuinely new, fun things with far less.

~~~
polm23
The original word is 枯れる, which really is normally translated as "withered",
or, contextually, "dead" or "dried up". Translating it as "commodity parts"
loses the implication that common sense says the technology is "used up" in
some way. It's not a word you'd normally use to praise something.

Here's a bunch of sentences with English translations that use the word:

[https://jisho.org/search/%E6%9E%AF%E3%82%8C%E3%82%8B%20%23se...](https://jisho.org/search/%E6%9E%AF%E3%82%8C%E3%82%8B%20%23sentences)

There is also a sense that means "matured" or "tested by time", but I've
honestly never seen it outside a dictionary, and in fact for many dictionaries
the example usage of that sense is just 枯れた技術, Gunpei Yokoi's term. Example:

[https://kotobank.jp/word/%E6%9E%AF%E3%82%8C%E3%82%8B-468424](https://kotobank.jp/word/%E6%9E%AF%E3%82%8C%E3%82%8B-468424)

~~~
fenomas
Yeah I think the article was off-base there - "withered" isn't a
mistranslation at all. I'd probably have gone with "dried-up", but to
translate it as "weathered" changes the meaning considerably.

~~~
gwbas1c
I disagree, weathered often implies broken in, established, mature.

~~~
thedudeabides5
Probably a concept that would be helpful to adopt in the west.

Like, tech can be so concerned with the new new, we sometimes forget there's a
bunch of old stuff that works pretty reliably, and can be applied in new and
creative directions, with a little 'lateral' thinking.

------
nrp
“ While you may think of virtual reality as the definition of a cutting-edge
category, the Oculus Rift’s two most important components are a cheap
smartphone screen and a pair of fifty cent lenses. These two withered parts
allowed for mainstream pricing ($350) and freed the team to work on peripheral
innovations like decreasing latency and refining positional tracking.”

Interestingly, a lot of our tracking and latency related work was withered
technology too. We used MEMS sensors that were being made in enormous
quantities for mobile phones, and a lot of the latency philosophy came from
old concepts of “chasing the beam” in rendering.

~~~
Fr0styMatt88
For me, the use of the Snapdragon 835 in the Oculus Quest seems like a really
good example of this philosophy as well. Definitely 'withered' by the time the
Oculus Quest was released. Yet it's doing things to a quality that I've never
seen it do in any Snapdragon 835-based phone.

~~~
gambiting
Same can be said about the Switch - the Nvidia Tegra chipset used is
absolutely ancient by modern standards, yet in the Switch it's used to much
higher quality than in any other device with the same or similar chipset.

------
Operyl
While the article is most definitely talking about their hardware, I can't
help but feel they probably take a similar approach to their software.
Switch's OS is basically a fork of their 3DS OS, with much more thought put
into play about security (the 3DS was swiss cheese). Of course, there were
many bugs to be found (using a massively out of date webkit at launch, they
outsourced this to some vendor). But after all these years, online play in
their first party games is still just so .. atrocious. Ugh.

~~~
nicolas_t
That also has to do with the state of software in Japan. For a very long time,
being a software developer was seen as much less prestigious than being an
electronic engineeer and a bit more akin to a secretary that codes up the
requirements...

So the best and the brightest did not tend to go into software and the typical
state of software engineering in a lot of big japanese companies was extremely
bad... It's getting better but it's still not great.

Nintendo also has a tendency to outsource a lot of their software development
(IIRC the SDK for the wii and the DS was outsourced to intelligent systems who
themselves then outsourced part of it)

This is of course a generalization as things goes and there are great things
coming out of Japan (hello Ruby!) but having lived there, there was a marked
difference between the software engineering culture in Japan and the one I saw
in the US and Europe, with Japan being easily a decade or more behind.

~~~
stevenwoo
I worked for Namco Bandai's American branch for a few years around 2006. The
Japanese developers could apply to work in America for the cultural
experience, IIRC the ones I met told me they were paid about $30000 USA in
Japan and got a temporary bump in salary to $75000 or so for cost of living
adjustment and a company car and apartment (this was in Santa Clara, CA). I
think they were all extremely good, competent programmers and we American
programmers were making about double what they were making, our contractors
were making I think triple what they made. One of the Japanese guys coding
anonymously in the corner worked on several of the Namco cabinet video games
like Dig Dug back in the day.

~~~
stallmanite
I hope this isn’t too off topic but my son and I spent a lot of hours bonding
over the game “Tank Tank Tank”. If by some small chance you were part of that
project, thank you.

~~~
stevenwoo
Sorry that was after my time, may have been entirely Namco Bandai Japan
production.

------
saturdaysaint
It's remarkable how their fundamental "lateral" insight of the last decade was
so blindingly obvious in this age of the smartphone - portability is king. I
wonder if they collected data from the 3DS and WiiU and could tell that
playtime on portable systems was orders of magnitude greater on portables.

If you ask me, given my experience owning a Switch and watching my PS4 and
gaming PC gather dust, the most compelling product Sony or Microsoft could
make right now would be releasing a system with PS4 / Xbox One level power in
a portable form factor (and the latest smartphones do push more gigaflops than
those systems). As has been said many times about smartphone cameras, the best
gaming system is the one with you.

~~~
oneVoiceOnHN
If your gaming PC is gathering dust but you play the switch, you probably are
falling for the marketing.

PC has nearly every game switch has, and more.

Nintendo is a big marketing company, advertising when you were a child and
unaware. Now people nostalgia and automatically but their products.

My best example of this is BOTW which is an average game, but the fans have
claimed it's the greatest game of all time. (Which people have been saying
about Zelda since TP)

~~~
elpatoisthebest
So, I have an 8 year old. The switch is probably the most fun couch gaming we
can do together. We also have an xbox and a pc for games, and we usually
ignore them both in favor of Nintendo exclusives. Pokemon, BOTW, Smash Bros.

It's honestly a really good co-op couch experience. And when we go on road
trips, it's better than the days when we would load up a fat crt tv in my
parent's van and plug in the SNES.

Also, if I'm working in my office, he can bring the switch into the room with
me and play while I work. Portable is nice.

~~~
deepakhj
Sure for kids the switch can’t be beat. But the best games are all on Sony
(some on PC too) Witcher 3, horizon zero down, god of war, uncharted 4, the
last of us, persona 5, nier automata, assassins creed oddysey, red dead
redemption 2, Spider-Man, etc.

~~~
throwaway17_17
Your list, with the exception of Persona 5 and somewhat Nier, are all games in
the same, 3rd-person-open-world-AAA action/adventure genre. Claiming that ‘the
best games’ are all one only one platform and that they are all in the exact
same genre says much more about personal preference than the quality of game
play experience on various consoles and PC.

— Edited a typo —

------
schnevets
Love it. Tech has been so obsessed with "the next Facebook" for the last 15
years that there have been thousands of useful concepts lying on the table.
While everyone jumped from mobile to wearables to AR to machine intelligence,
there are billion-dollar companies that amount to little more than a CRUD
framework, a few innovations, and intelligent marketing/strategy/advisory.

It gives me hope for the future - if we can get more people from various walks
of life to learn how to code and appreciate technology, there is so much more
we can do. Of course, that "if" has always been a huge challenge.

~~~
X6S1x6Okd1st
Got some examples?

~~~
hirako2000
I can think of SalesForce, asana and others in the glorified crud category.
Slack and similar chatting apps are just IRC for then common user, yet it
worked seeing their valuations.

~~~
X6S1x6Okd1st
My experience with SalesForce is that it is way more complicated than a simple
CRUD app.

------
huffmsa
Even when they did ship with more cutting edge power and tech, they approached
it as if they didn't have it.

It partly comes from the video game things being a bit of a gamble and side
project to keep the company alive. "Success under constraint."

And not it's a bit of an intentional handicap, like setting a horsepower cap
on a racecar. Anyone can go fast and make something spectacular with unlimited
power, but when bleeding edge graphics aren't even available for you to waste
time considering, you have to finds new ways to make your game "fun".

You have to think of new control schemes, new mechanics, endearing art styles,
etc. You can't just melt faces (and wallets) with the visuals.

------
epigramx
Fancy literature but in the end it says little. There is a simple way to put
it. Sometimes an era has missed some of the innovations it could have done and
spends too much time caring only about the core technology but it might be
beneficial to stay a little more and innovate on the general design rather
than just the core technology.

------
dlivingston
What strikes me about Nintendo is that their hardware quality is rather
lacking. Maybe I'm spoiled by Apple et al., but my Switch feels quite the
opposite of premium in the hand.

More to the point of the article, however: while Nintendo does use "withered"
technology, perhaps it's too withered. The Switch uses an ARM-based CPU/GPU
SoC from 2015: obsolete before the Switch came out! The GameBoy Color,
released in 1998, was the first GameBoy to feature a non-monochrome display: a
feature the Sega GameGear had, with its 8-bit color and a backlit display, in
1990.

Nintendo seems to be consistently about a decade behind the current standard
of technology, but they innovate in such clever and serendipitous ways that
their "Ludditism" is easy to forgive.

~~~
nikofeyn
i have a lot of complaints about nintendo, but nintendo's only console to be
well ahead of their competitors' offerings in terms of hardware was one of
their worst competing consoles, in terms of sales. and that's the gamecube. so
it hasn't made and doesn't make commercial sense for them to heavily invest in
the underlying hardware.

ever since the gamecube, and maybe before then, nintendo has been on a
divergent path from the likes of other console makers. they do not seek to
compete in hardware power.

nintendo's true problems lie in online and cloud services, like account
management and online multiplayer, and just pure laziness in game development
and implementation. they get away with it somehow.

~~~
huffmsa
> _pure laziness in game development_

Ah you're one of those "how do they keep getting away with making more Mario
games?" people.

The secret is that they don't release mainline games very often. You don't get
a new one every year. You get one every 3-4 (or Metroid 6-10) years.

And when you do get a new installment it's just as fun and joyful as the
previous ones.

They do need to get their shit in gear with the online stuff though. And
emulation. They could and probably should acquihire a few companies to deal
with those. If they made their entire back-catalog available on an official
emulator that works one this and the next generation console, they'd be set
forever.

Though they've already got enough cash in the bank to run for 50 years even if
they stopped all new sales.

~~~
Kaiyou
When was the last Metroid game that is "just as fun and joyful as the previous
ones"? Metroid has had a tough 20 years or so. Last I checked Nintendo
released a poorer version of a remake some fan released a year earlier.

~~~
haberman
I genuinely enjoyed Other M. I've always preferred the third-person platformer
style for the franchise (Super Metroid is still the best installment in the
series) and I thought Other M was faithful to this heritage while adding some
more modern twists.

~~~
blaser-waffle
Man, 100% opposite opinion -- I thought Other M was terrible, particularly the
writing and pacing.

------
analyticascent
In a weird way, I think Nintendo's approach is basically "Zero to One" to
differentiate from competitors, but doing it with cheaper hardware to reduce
costs.

I'm not a gamer, but from a business perspective I'm intrigued with their
approach.

~~~
libertine
Hmm I'm not sure if Zero to One fits into what Nintendo does - maybe the Wii
was (arguably the N64).

Nintendo main differentiation revolves around their IP, which they manage to
refresh with every new console release by making some console feature into a
game mechanic (and the gameplay revolves around it).

You can see good examples of it in their hardware accessories for games, where
they don't feel like gimmicks, yet on other consoles some accessories do feel
like it.

------
pkilgore
Reminds me of [http://boringtechnology.club/](http://boringtechnology.club/)

------
meeebooo
This does backfire for them in certain cases though, especially in terms of
networking. All of their games are still on a built-out peer2peer
implementation they acquired in 2008 and it shows how much it holds them back
- anyone that played a Nintendo online game on switch knows what I mean (no,
30 NES games I played on my Wii aren't a consolation).

Let's not even talk about friend codes in 2020.

------
Kaiyou
Didn't Nintendo drop this philosophy the moment Gunpei left to work on a
GameBoy competitor for Bandai and pushed out the GBC? Or was it after Gunpei
died in a car accident shortly after? The NGC also didn't follow this
philosophy and neither did the GBA. It wasn't until the Wii/NDS era, when they
kind of brought it back.

~~~
philistine
We perceive Nintendo as working under the principles of Yokoi because he wrote
his vision in a book. The reality is more complicated.

------
k__
_" the Oculus Rift’s two most important components are a cheap smartphone
screen and a pair of fifty cent lenses"_

I got a smartphone and a VR headset to put it in. Yes they are cheap, but the
experience is completely different from the Rift.

These may be the most fundamental parts, but they are not what makes the Rift
a good VR set.

~~~
joshjdr
“These two withered parts allowed for mainstream pricing ($350) and freed the
team to work on peripheral innovations like decreasing latency and refining
positional tracking.”

The focus on decreasing latency is arguably what differentiated the Rift early
on: [https://www.wired.com/2014/05/oculus-
rift-4/](https://www.wired.com/2014/05/oculus-rift-4/)

------
growlist
Often the British engineering philosophy, tbh - frugality of necessity.

~~~
huffmsa
Yeah, but Nintendo's don't leave oil stains all over the garage.

~~~
cnasc
You can tell which parking spots I use most frequently at my apartment complex
based on the size of the oil puddle. Jaguars are an opsec liability

~~~
huffmsa
Haven't checked my F-Pace now that you've mentioned it. It's sitting a lot
during this quarantine

------
marmolito
me parece una excelente idea

