Masahiro Sakurai: Slams "Unnatural" Amount Of Video Game Remakes
Nintendo Designer mourns lack of imagination
The creator and director of Kirby and the Super Smash Bros series was judging at Tokyo Game Show last month, and he has an opinion about reboots of old games.
He spoke about TGS and his opinions on the video gaming industry in his weekly column in the new Famitsu magazine - read on to find out what he had to say.
In his column, he spoke a lot about the actual judging and how judges don't get much chance to play the games they're reviewing. Instead, he explained that game devs spend most of their time watching videos and participating in interviews - that's not the important part though.
When he moved away from the judging chat, he went on to speak about the video games industry using and reusing the same titles - here's what he wrote:
"Is there any industry that relies so much on reusing and reusing their old titles as much as video games? Compared to other media like movies, dramas, animation, novels and comics, the glut of franchises and remakes is at an unnatural level."
When he questioned why this was the case, he answered with: "You have to learn the rules of a game before you can play, and that presents hurdles from the very start, that's why you have a generally unified approach to control methods between titles, and you can usually play one by taking what you already know and adding a feature or two to it — X means jump, Square means attack, and so on."
"Good games attract fans, and if you have fans, you have an advantage," he wrote. "You try to use that to make the title something bigger, but that doesn't mean it's okay to give up on innovation. Popular, well-made games deserve praise, but titles that have some kind of unique creative spark to them also need to be praised in this way. That's what the judges are trying to do here, and it won't work if it was just popular majority vote. That would lead to people just voting on names and past performances."
What are your views on the situation? Should developers be 100% innovative in their new titles, or is it alright to reboot classics? The comments section's there for a reason!
He spoke about TGS and his opinions on the video gaming industry in his weekly column in the new Famitsu magazine - read on to find out what he had to say.
In his column, he spoke a lot about the actual judging and how judges don't get much chance to play the games they're reviewing. Instead, he explained that game devs spend most of their time watching videos and participating in interviews - that's not the important part though.
When he moved away from the judging chat, he went on to speak about the video games industry using and reusing the same titles - here's what he wrote:
"Is there any industry that relies so much on reusing and reusing their old titles as much as video games? Compared to other media like movies, dramas, animation, novels and comics, the glut of franchises and remakes is at an unnatural level."
When he questioned why this was the case, he answered with: "You have to learn the rules of a game before you can play, and that presents hurdles from the very start, that's why you have a generally unified approach to control methods between titles, and you can usually play one by taking what you already know and adding a feature or two to it — X means jump, Square means attack, and so on."
"Good games attract fans, and if you have fans, you have an advantage," he wrote. "You try to use that to make the title something bigger, but that doesn't mean it's okay to give up on innovation. Popular, well-made games deserve praise, but titles that have some kind of unique creative spark to them also need to be praised in this way. That's what the judges are trying to do here, and it won't work if it was just popular majority vote. That would lead to people just voting on names and past performances."
What are your views on the situation? Should developers be 100% innovative in their new titles, or is it alright to reboot classics? The comments section's there for a reason!
Companies:
Nintendo
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Comments
realvictory 11 Oct 2013 12:37
1/3
The music industry does do quite a lot of "remakes"
Deej 11 Oct 2013 13:43
2/3
The music industry tend to sway towards "remixes" rather than remakes - changing how a song sounds seems more worthwhile than taking an old game and making it HD. And let's be fair, songs usually cost 79p on iTunes rather than £40 for a "re-skinned" game.
JasonShanley 22 Jul 2021 03:42
3/3
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