5 – Nintendo – Beginnings,
- Nintendo has been around for a lot longer than the video game industry, in fact they’re quite a bit older than the popularised use of electricity, but they still produced gaming products.
- They made Hanafuda playing cards, which managed to get around the anti-gambling laws since they didn’t have numbers on them, instead they had intricate art and symbols to take their place.
4 – ZombiU – Rabbid Rabbits,
- ZombiU is a sequel to a lesser known game released in the Commodore 64 era, which was a first person adventure game with the same mechanic of fighting the reanimations of your failed attempts through the game.
- But originally it was going to feature the Raving Rabbids, the spin-off series from Rayman, the cartoony enemies would have probably felt more at home on the Wii U, but it’s hard to imagine it being the same game at all.
3 – Super Mario 64 – Horsey,
- Epona from Ocarina of Time was actually originally going to be included in Super Mario 64, where instead of riding Yoshi around he would have a horse.
- The idea got moved to Zelda as a core mechanic designed at the start, it’s easy to see why since Epona’s controls would have felt very out of place in a Mario Game.
2 – Earthbound – Miyamoto’s Seal of Approval,
- Nintendo had published and therefore placed a solid bet on the success of both Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest/Warrior, but it seems this wasn’t an informed decision by the head of the company.
- Miyamoto, ex-head of Nintendo, claims he never beat an RPG until Earthbound’s release, so it’s easy to guess that he didn’t oversee every decision.
- His exact words were ‘”I’ve finished MOTHER 1, too. Though I had to use the debug mode. But this (Earthbound) is the first one I ever finished on my own. I even restarted from the very beginning when I lost my save file. I was pretty impressed with myself, to be honest.’
1 – Nintendo – Love Hotel
- Did you know that Nintendo actually had a sleazy past? I mean, subverting gambling laws might sound sleazy, and it kind of is, but it’s nothing compared to when they opened up a ‘Love Hotel’ in 1960, which is a Japanese hotel specialised for couples to have sex in.
- Not really relevant to making games, unless you add a high-score to bonking, but it goes to show just how much a company can change.
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