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   Anthk (anthk@paquita.masto.host)'s status on Monday, 10-Mar-2025 17:48:12 JST Anthk

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   • Juan

   @reidrac Nintendo was born as a physical game company. Think about it. Pieces had to be outsourced back in the day. So they kept doing the same.

   • Embed this notice
     Juan (reidrac@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Monday, 10-Mar-2025 17:48:13 JST Juan

     in reply to

     This is interesting culturally, because in the early days with less people involved in making games, I would have expected the coder to be more relevant (and to be essential in some cases, because it doesn't matter how good is a design if it can't be implemented).

     Yet in Nintendo history, we know that Super Mario was designed by Miyamoto (and Tezuka too, less known?), but I don't hear much about Toshihiko Nakago of SRD that *programmed the thing*.

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     Juan (reidrac@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Monday, 10-Mar-2025 17:48:14 JST Juan

     TIL; until the SNES, generally Nintendo didn't program their games, they used contractors. As in, those coders weren't Nintendo employees.

     Which is weird because, why this is not a more widely known fact? Or may be I wasn't paying attention 🤔

     So Nintendo did the hardware and the game design, and that "game design" is what is generally referred to as "creating the game", as if programming it wasn't really relevant.

     e.g. Donkey Kong arcade was coded by 4 programmers from Ikegami Tsushinki Co.