In a new interview with Satoru Okada, a former general manager in Nintendo’s Research and Engineering, he talks about how he helped birth the Game Boy as well as how no-one really understood why the Nintendo DS needed two screens.
While you may not have heard of Okada, he is an important figure behind the scenes at Nintendo, especially in regards to the company’s hardware development. So this new interview is a wonderful thing indeed.
As someone that loves all things Game Boy related, it’s interesting to hear more on how the system came about, as Okada explains, “When I was young, I was rather stubborn and often became angry at my superiors when was trying to defend my ideas. The best example of this was the Game Boy. The Game Boy you know today actually had nothing to do with the one Gunpei Yokoi had in mind. He saw the Game Boy as a direct follow-on from the Game & Watch, which meant a rather cheap toy, without any real business model and no long-term ambition.
“To give you a clear comparison, Yokoi wanted a Game Boy that would have looked like the Microvision and would not have lasted more than one or two seasons. For instance, he did not care if there were third-party editors or not. Furthermore, he only wanted ‘quick games’, quickly completed and quickly forgotten. I wanted the Game Boy to have more ambition, closer to what the R&D2 had managed to with the Famicom: a machine built to last, with hardware that was good enough to play a variety of quality titles.
“I was the assistant director of R&D1 and we had many arguments over this. In the end, he gave in and angrily told me: ‘Okay, do what you want!’ l then asked him: ‘Fine! But are you giving me full responsibility?’ and since he said ‘yes’, I made the Game Boy project my own. Yokoi just gave his seal of approval. In the end, the Game Boy was much more similar to the Famicom than the Game & Watch. The hardware was good enough to offer a wide range of games and we were ready to welcome third-party editors, with a real development kit, instruction booklets and some real support.”
From this it’s clear that the development of the Game Boy wasn’t a straightforward affair at all and that it could have ended up very different, as well as something rather short lived and awful.
However, the creation of the Nintendo DS almost happened in reverse compared to the Game Boy, as the dual screen functionality was something that confounded people at Nintendo when it was suggested.
“After the Game Boy Advance SP, we were working on the newest model in this range. The code name for this new Game Boy was IRIS, like the flower. The explanation for this name is simple: since it was for us the fifth generation of Game Boy, we chose the symbol of May (the fifth month of the year). In the Hanafuda playing cards, the month of May is symbolized by the Iris.
“The project was moving forward at a good pace but during the development, something unexpected happened. President Satoru Iwata came to see me. He was obviously bothered and he said: ‘l talked to Yamauchi-san over the phone and he thinks your console should have two screens, a bit like the multi-screen Game & Watch, you see?’ Everybody is aware of this, but what people do not know is that at the time, everybody hated this idea, even Iwata himself.
“We thought it did not make any sense. Back in the Game & Watch days, it was different because a second screen allowed us to double the playing area and the number of graphic elements on display but with modern screens, there was no point. We were free to choose the size of our screen, so why bother splitting it into two? Especially considering that it was impossible to look at both screens at the same time. This is why we did not understand his idea.”
Considering that the Nintendo DS is the company’s strongest selling console to date, with over 150 million units sold worldwide, it’s interesting to know that its signature dual screen setup was something that was initially disliked.
In addition to this recent interview, Shmuplations also translated an interview from a few years back with Okada. It’s also worth a read, not least for his take on the future of consoles, which I think is entirely spot on.
“Consoles designed specifically for games have their own unique strengths. Unlike the generic smart phone touch panel, consoles can have controllers and input devices specifically designed for games, which is a big advantage. I don’t think that consoles today have exhausted those possibilities yet.”
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