Something that I cut out of my article on the Game Developers Conference was the part of Mr. Iwata’s speech where he promoted the latest Nintendo game called Rhythm and Beat or something like that. According to Iwata, it’s a music and dancing game that Nintendo created when a famous Japanese musician came to Nintendo and said, “Hey! You should make a videogame about music!” Nintendo responded, “OK!”, dropped everything they were doing, gave him a development team, and thus the game was born.
Now, if that story sounds familiar, that’s because it is. That’s the same story they gave about the Professor Layton games—the Japanese Martin Gardner visited Nintendo, so they made him a videogame. Same with the Japanese brain scientist who they made the Brain Age DS games for. I get the feeling it’s a story made up by Nintendo’s marketing department, designed to give Nintendo a “we go out of our way to make games people want” image.
Now, I’m just wondering if Americans have a reason to gripe about this image, because Nintendo sometimes comes across as caring more about Japan than foreign markets. There are games that people wanted/want, like the other games in the Professor Layton series, Secret of Mana 2, Mother 3, and so on. But despite high demand, these games remain untranslated into English. So I guess I’m wondering…how do people feel about Nintendo’s “we go out of our way to make games people want” image?
