Shigeru Miyamoto's
Game Dev Conference 1999 speech
(Zelda related excerpt)
The full transcript can be found at Miyamoto
Shrine.
Gamasutra.com has a full
video of Miyamoto's speech.
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Next, I'd like to discuss a game that I recently worked on, which you may or may not have heard of.
We started with about four or five different teams, each working on basic experiments related to game design.
- Scenario and Planning - both very necessary. The team discussed the position of this title in the whole series, and included myself and several dedicated script writers.
- Link's action and 3-D improvements of items found previously in the series: This team included myself, Mr. Yoshiaki Koizumi who has worked on player characters since the days of Mario, and the head programmer. Mr. Koizumi is here in the audience this evening. Where are you? If you happen to see him at the conference, say hello. He may share some useful information with you.
- A variety of Camera experiments were conducted by the same team that handled Link's action plus several designers and programmers. We worked on incorporating new methods, such as background virtual boxes which we did not use in Mario, as well as fixed camera modes like we used in the castle.
- Another team worked on bringing the items that Link touches and uses that lay at the basis of the game, into the 3D world.
- Motion capture production and tests for the creation of the converter used in the Zelda's animation, which was done by an entirely different team.
We also formed new teams according to our needs. There was the
- Sound team: Ocarina play and 3-D sound
- Special Effects
- The flow of time in the background and background culling appropriate for Zelda. What was unique here was not just what was visible in the background, but progressing with design and integration of terrain specific sound and movement, camera moves, and enemy data and tools effective for manipulating this data.
We design the entire game by organizing these small teams and conducting tests to confirm memory size and processing speed. Let us recall Hyrule Field in the Legend of Zelda. The characters that appear in the field all share RAM. So, following the scenario, we have the great bird, Gebola, and the Skeleton enemies, and then once the bird has left the field, the Marathon Man appears. When Link rides the horse as an adult, the only enemy to appear is the ghost. So the scenario is written to match these types of design specifications.
I would like to add that depending on the type of game we may start development with just the character's movement, and of course not all experiments will be adopted in the final game.
These are the technical aspects of Zelda's development. Let me now talk about the concepts behind the game. Through our experience of making this interactive media called video games, we have uncovered a number of methods to stimulate a player's emotion. One way is through the use of cinematic sequences. As you know, seeing with one's own eye can give a more pronounced effect than a player's imagination. With that, let's take a look at some of Zelda's cinema scenes.
We have seen several examples of these cinema scenes, but we positioned these sequences as only one part of development. In Zelda, there are over 1 hour and 30 minutes of cinema scenes. But the staff involved in creating these scenes was only 3 individuals for most of the development process, and in the latter stages, only 6 or 7. The reason behind using such a simple process, as I am sure you have all experienced in the workshop, is that there is a total limit on team energy. There is a limit to the work a team can do, and there is a limit to my own energy. We opted not to use that limited time and energy on pre-rendered images for use in cinema scenes, but rather on tests on other inter-active elements and polishing up the game to create a product that players can enjoy and play comfortably. Actually, I changed the scenario just a few months before completion, and although the staff was rather unhappy about taking apart something they had already created, we were able to make the fixes in a short amount of time, so that it did not cause any problems time-wise. It is not because the N64 doesn't have access to a CD-Rom that we incorporated real-time movie processing. Quite the contrary, to the greatest extent possible we were able to make use of truly cinematic methods with our camera work without relying on the kind of data typically used to make cinema scenes.
Our president, Mr. Yamauchi says that each product has its own mission. We set interactivity as the mission for our products. And thanks to that, we were able to experience development that no one had experienced before.
I have talked about several different topics this evening, but now I would like to discuss the future of game design.
Shall I begin making Zelda for our next generation hardware. At this point, the answer to that question is no. The reason for my saying this is that all of the elements for which Zelda has received so much praise for had already been incorporated into the game more than a year before completion, when I felt the game was not fun to play. I think that a lot of the reasons that Zelda has been so praised are not related the N64's level of expression, the unique camera systems and auto-jump system, nor the gorgeous cinema scenes and spectacular boss fights. It is true that some other team may realize the level of expression that we achieved with Zelda, but of course it will not be the exact same as Zelda. With improved hardware, I can imagine Zelda having more detailed graphics and a quicker response time, but when it comes to increasing the degree of fun, I cannot be certain of that at this time. This is something that I feel we as designers must reconsider.
Also, I want to constantly make efforts to create new ideas. I want to propose new game ideas without worrying about the headaches of management, such as inflated development costs. Video games have become far more popular than in the past, but I feel that we have just been repeating the same events again and again in this unique market. Even with Zelda I did not feel that sense of freshness that I had with the original Super Mario Bros. I want to make efforts to convey the charm of video games to the general public that is currently outside the reach of the industry in which we do business. This is because I really want to feel the unique zest of the entertainment industry, where one simple idea can create an unexpected social phenomenon.
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