Nemesis24
Tektite
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Oh ok good to know, I thought they had smaller shares since it was a joint venture. so its just 7 acquisitions
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StarTopic Nintendo First Party Software Development |ST| Nintendo Party Superstars
- Thread starter astrogamer
- Start date
Nemesis24
Tektite
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Funny enough i think most studios in nintendo are support atp. You have:
Lead:
Retro
NST
Monolith
NERD
NdCube
NLG
Support:
1-up
NST
Monolith
Ndcube
ique
mario club
SRD
nintendo pictures
C_Ali
Arbiter Of Chaos
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Hmmmmm, wasn’t even aware…
BlackthornOrion
#theprocessworks
iirc that's their hardware/tech division that was established during the internal reshuffle in 2015 (around the time they consolidated their internal development and established EPD)
So like, it's the department that would be working on new consoles, accessories like the Ring-Con, maybe network/infrastructure stuff, etc. Not really something that would come up a ton when talking about games
OctoSplattack
Tingle
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Yes. They develop technology.
...Okay, to be more specific, they're a US-based R&D team that works with Nintendo Platform Technology Development over in Japan on hardware/software development tools and the like. Think NERD, but with a less fun acronym for a name. Development support for third-party studios is also part of their duties.
EDIT: Huh, NERD apparently had a US branch that was merged into NTD. Neat.
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Nintendo had a north american hardware technology team for a good long time now. they got put under the new NTD group some time ago
Hero of Legend
Koopa
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Also important is their very important but under the radar "Nintendo Porting Team" or whatever their name is that is under NTD. They're the team behind Super Mario Galaxy and Pikmin 1 & 2 on Switch IIRC.
I even made a thread at Era about them:
The "Nintendo Porting Team" seem to be a brilliant new under the radar team at Nintendo (SM Galaxy, Pikmin 1 & 2)
Or more specifically this is how Pikmin 1 credits them: Porting Technology Development Team / Technology Development Department Nintendo European Research & Development (Pretty sure folks just address them as Nintendo Porting Team so that's what I'm going with). Also I think NERD only...
www.resetera.com
NTD. Nintendo Technology Development was created in 1996. It all traces back to around 1994, when Nintendo was working with SGI (Silicon Graphics Inc.) for the technology on the N64. As the company started facing management issues - Nintendo poached Howard Cheng and Rob Moore to start Nintendo Technology Development in Redmond, WA. The group was basically their first US hardware technology design team. In addition, several other members of SGI (Wei Yen, Greg Buchner) started Art-X which would developed the GameCube graphic technology alongside NTD (US) and Nintendo IRD (Japan). Wei Yen would later leave Art-X after the ATI buyout, and form iQue with Nintendo backing in China.
Nintendo PTD is the reformed Japan tech team that emerged in 2015, alongside EPD. Nintendo PTD is the lead developer tied to the hip of everything NTD, NERD, and iQue do - so it's hard to distinguish their work often.
Hero of Legend
Koopa
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Oh shit, never knew Nintendo poached other SGI folks other than Wei Yen for iQue. Are Howard and Rob still at NTD? Any other SGI/Art-X/ATI folks at Nintendo these days? How much did Wei Yen bring with him to iQue?
Nemesis24
Tektite
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So NTD still exists in NOA?
goldrogerii
Piranha Plant
OctoSplattack
Tingle
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APileofBananas
Tektite
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I actually was wondering if we know that PTD's porting team worked on 3D All-Stars, or if that's an assumption since we don't have credits for it. I recall originally folks were saying it was a mix of EPD 8, 1-up Studios, NERD & iQue before we saw the porting team mentioned in the Pikmin credits.
I also wonder if they truly have a "porting team" or if that's just the name they went under similar to how they went under Kart & Gate Development team for Mario Kart Live.
I also wonder if they truly have a "porting team" or if that's just the name they went under similar to how they went under Kart & Gate Development team for Mario Kart Live.
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rick_C
Octorok
I dont know whether it is new of not, but i found that Doug Bowser and Stephan Bale are back in Executive Officers list. https://www.nintendo.co.jp/corporate/en/officer/index.html
Maybe it is just a mistake for their missing in Feb.
Maybe it is just a mistake for their missing in Feb.
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Wow, his friend who joined Nintendo with Imamura is still a designer for the Mario series.
www.famitsu.com
『スターフォックス』『F-ZERO』の今村孝矢氏が任天堂での開発の日々を振り返る。最新作『オメガ6』につながるレトロな作風の原点に迫る | ゲーム・エンタメ最新情報のファミ通.com
『F-ZERO』や『スターフォックス』のアートディレクターを務めた今村孝矢氏が原作、イラストを担当するという最新作『OMEGA 6 THE TRIANGLE STARS（オメガシックス ザ・トライアングルスターズ）』。本作の完成までの経緯に加えて、氏のテイストがひしひしと伝わってくる“レトロフューチャー”の作風、その根幹についても訊いてみた。
www.famitsu.com
Wow, his friend who joined Nintendo with Imamura is still a designer for the Mario series.
『スターフォックス』『F-ZERO』の今村孝矢氏が任天堂での開発の日々を振り返る。最新作『オメガ6』につながるレトロな作風の原点に迫る | ゲーム・エンタメ最新情報のファミ通.com
『F-ZERO』や『スターフォックス』のアートディレクターを務めた今村孝矢氏が原作、イラストを担当するという最新作『OMEGA 6 THE TRIANGLE STARS（オメガシックス ザ・トライアングルスターズ）』。本作の完成までの経緯に加えて、氏のテイストがひしひしと伝わってくる“レトロフューチャー”の作風、その根幹についても訊いてみた。
Shigefumi Hino
I know Howard Chen was there for a long time and a few years ago received a promotion. Can't confirm if he is there today.
PTD seems to manage all emulation related works (VC, emulation porting) so they must have had some involvement. But for 3D All Stars EPD8 was in charge and definitely handled the new front-end, menu, some textures and UI. iQue was mainly in charge of the N64 emulator. 1-Up Studio helped update some textures. NERD "contributed to the GC and Wii emulation and porting" -- and PTD/EPD8 had main involvement in the GC and Wii porting.
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APileofBananas
Tektite
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I see, so I may be misinterpreting, but are they involved in all of the Switch Online emulation? I had thought that was mostly NERD.
I also had it in my head that 1-ups role was more significant then their usual support work, but it seems like that isn't the case either. So if we were to assign lead developers to the project it seems to be EPD 8, iQue, NERD, and PTD (and NTD?)?
Hero of Legend
Koopa
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I know iQue was the original N64 emu folks (with the OG iQue plug and play device in China being the N64) which is uber fitting as they of course were born from ex-SGI folks who created the N64 itself, but should that not apply to GC as well as Wei Yen left after Art-X worked on the GC at least in a major portion of the way? You'd think they'd have some key GC (and technically thus Wii as well) tech experience to contribute to NERD and PTD's work on the GC/Wii work as well. But maybe because they basically were born and bred from the N64 most specifically, that's where their crucial focus lies?
Speaking of... how did Nintendo handle Ocarina and Majora on GC in that collection? I recall reading those did not turn out super well and I think were emulated as opposed to direct ports like Animal Crossing, Doshin, Cubivore, etc.?
Nemesis24
Tektite
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so much for the thing people say out there that japanese stay in the same company, as if there isnt a lot of studios created from capcom and konami alone lolthings are getting crazy in japan, cygames and ilca are poaching senior talent like crazy in their expansionist pursuits, and theres even chinese companies, level 5,capcom and platinum in particular are being affected the most
junglehead
Cappy
I'm incredibly curious: If it's within reason to disclose, what were his health issues? Is that publicly disclosed knowledge?
Looking through his development history, Tanabe used to be involved with a significant amount of projects at a time, upwards of 5 releases a year for roughly 9 years. In 2014, this would see a reduction down to 1, in DKC:TF, and technically speaking, that game was planned for a Nov. 2013 launch and going by Retro's Eric Kozlowsky, their delay was mostly for departments like VFX and animation to deliver some more items, so it's unlikely there was important design there with which he was involved.
Why was there such a sudden halt to his involvement in many projects? It's not a hard question to think up answers for, of course, and one can easily conjure up the fact that he's been much more involved with on-hands game design in recent projects (see: designing a full-on diagram for PMTOK's boss battles) alongside the fact he's mainly involved with only larger IP he's worked on too, so you can certainly extrapolate a more honed-in focus on his best performers there. (He produced a lot of smaller titles and only really produced a knockout hit with Returns in 2010, which pre-LM3 was the best-selling game he was involved with. Iwata also asked him to be more present for that game's production and I feel like that certainly influenced how much more present he is with the games we hear he works on now.)
There's a lot to go into but there's a very fuzzy mixture of things involving stories of him on Tropical Freeze, a smaller project list and more pronounced involvement, but I'm really wondering what the rapport is on that guy's current situation. (well, "current", more like the past 11 years at this point lol.)
Chiffon
Rattata
Wockio
NSMB2 Millionaire
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- He
HD2D at home
Danny
Koopa
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- He/Him
And Nintendo is an investor in Cygames, Nintendo owns 5 % of Cygames stock. Maybe Cygames will do more on Switch 2 than they did on Switch 1?things are getting crazy in japan, cygames and ilca are poaching senior talent like crazy in their expansionist pursuits, and theres even chinese companies, level 5,capcom and platinum in particular are being affected the most
Hero of Legend
Koopa
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- He/Him
Back to the Skip talk, it's interesting how many ex-Skip folks there are to my recollection:
Oink Games (by generally the Art Style and bit generations folks, worked with Skip directly)
e-one (formed by Kenichi Nishi)
Asobism (was formed by Hiroshi Moriyama, director of the original three Chibi-Robo games, made Freakyforms)
Pictoy (Hiroshi left Asobism in 2015 to form this)
Honestly I wish they'd just all merge together and just give us Skip back. I gotta wonder what happened to them and why they just bled their top talent like they did. I guess Chibi-Robo through Captain Rainbow just didn't perform well enough. Like them not doing a proper Wii entry and not even localizing the Wii port of the first Chibi-Robo did some bad damage IMO, and Captain Rainbow not getting a chance in the west (to be fair it has controversial elements so that's partially to blame in itself) also really hurt.
I feel like with some more careful planning and care, Skip could've flourished without too much money spent. Say; handling Chibi-Robo right on Wii, made sure Captain Rainbow was western-friendly (but still crazy quirky and creative) and localize it, and maybe throw in a Wii port of Giftpia which was to be localized but never did, and yeah, maybe their fortunes could've been reversed.
Oink Games (by generally the Art Style and bit generations folks, worked with Skip directly)
e-one (formed by Kenichi Nishi)
Asobism (was formed by Hiroshi Moriyama, director of the original three Chibi-Robo games, made Freakyforms)
Pictoy (Hiroshi left Asobism in 2015 to form this)
Honestly I wish they'd just all merge together and just give us Skip back. I gotta wonder what happened to them and why they just bled their top talent like they did. I guess Chibi-Robo through Captain Rainbow just didn't perform well enough. Like them not doing a proper Wii entry and not even localizing the Wii port of the first Chibi-Robo did some bad damage IMO, and Captain Rainbow not getting a chance in the west (to be fair it has controversial elements so that's partially to blame in itself) also really hurt.
I feel like with some more careful planning and care, Skip could've flourished without too much money spent. Say; handling Chibi-Robo right on Wii, made sure Captain Rainbow was western-friendly (but still crazy quirky and creative) and localize it, and maybe throw in a Wii port of Giftpia which was to be localized but never did, and yeah, maybe their fortunes could've been reversed.
junglehead
Cappy
My wager here is that none of those companies have been successful enough to be able to allocate a budget that'd allow them to hire that many people at once. There's a reason they couldn't keep the lights on at Skip. Unrelated to this comment but I also wonder how management was for that place and if it was on the Alphadream side of things or the HAL labs side
Asobism has a couple moderately popular mobile games (Dragon Poker and Castle and Dragon) but I assume they don't want to reform Skip in particular.
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Sometimes people just wanna move on and do different things. It happens.
MetalLord
Paratroopa
but they want,at least some of them,the guys are still friends
Kimura: “But on this topic, I’ve always thought this, but moon 2 already exists. For me, it’s Chulip. For Taro-chan [Taro Kudo, game designer, and current Vanpool director], it’s Endonesia, while for Nishi-san I wonder if Giftpia is your moon 2. In terms of how time flows in the game, and how the characters inhabit the game world, all the members of Love-de-Lic have already made moon 2. That’s why, if moon becomes a hit this time, and everyone gets together to work on something again, that might be moon 3.”
Kenichi Nishi, moon director: “Actually, Suzuki-san and Matsuo-san have also said, “Try to get the members of Love-de-Lic together once again.” “Because it would be fun to get together once again at this age.” However, if you aren’t careful, it will turn into a reunion where people reminiscence about how things were better back then. I want to avoid that.”
StretchNStripes
Chibi-Robo! Enjoyer
- Pronouns
- Any, He/They preferred
It has always been heartening to see how a lot of the employees from Skip (and, going even further back, Love-de-Lic) manage to find spots for themselves in the games industry (even if they don't always stay in the same place for long). They continuously prove to be people who feel very strongly about creating. I hope a lot of them can continue to collaborate with Nintendo on projects going forwards. Obviously we can't get something like another Skip developed Chibi-Robo!, but some of the key people could surely be brought in if there was a desire to do so.
Hero of Legend
Koopa
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Actually I'm wondering; why DIDN'T Nintendo work directly with Love-de-Lic? You have an all-star team comprised of much of the Mario RPG team from just prior, and then of course Nintendo would directly work with all but Kimura anyway. The two companies are a match made in heaven. It'd have been something truly special if Nintendo directly worked with the entire LdL team when they were one, instead of the individual fragments. Who knows what magic they could've come up with.
rather than asking why didn't they, we should be asking why should they. it's not like Nintendo had a hard time coming up with Mario RPGs after the first one
StretchNStripes
Chibi-Robo! Enjoyer
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I'd love if one day down the line Nintendo did something with Onion Games (maybe in the vein of a new Tingle game or something?), but that's a pipedream. At least Stray Children is looking great so far.
junglehead
Cappy
It's interesting that he talks about this as if there's some form of a concrete, pre-meditated potential future of that happening. If I had to guess, it's probably just some wishes and conversation amongst former co-workers.
Wow, I never really made the connection of that transforming into Touch & Go. I guess if people want to know what becomes of these much more isolated prototype test games at Nintendo, there you go lol. It takes a very willing and confident producer to turn these games into viable new IP like Splatoon.
Wockio
NSMB2 Millionaire
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I've been thinking Mystery Dungeon DX was one of the games headed for 3DS that was scrapped after Mario & Luigi bombed
Looking at some gameplay and the backgrounds look very low res, like when you play games on Citra at max resolution, while the Pokemon can look very low poly at times
Looking at some gameplay and the backgrounds look very low res, like when you play games on Citra at max resolution, while the Pokemon can look very low poly at times
Hylianhero777
Boo
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Cross posting from the LM2 thread since I figure it's relevant info for this thread as well.
Watching the GVG direct predictions, and Jon says at 3:30 in this vid that Grezzo is NOT the dev team doing the LM2 Remaster, though he doesn't say who it is:
Watching the GVG direct predictions, and Jon says at 3:30 in this vid that Grezzo is NOT the dev team doing the LM2 Remaster, though he doesn't say who it is:
Hero of Legend
Koopa
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Odd he didn't just say who. Someone should just ask him.
Edit: Watched the segment and he says it in a very "it hasn't been publicly said but" so it sounds like he would but doesn't want to risk breaking any NDA.
Actually a couple of candidates to me, or three, would be; Square 1, Hellbent, or Eden Industries.
Square 1 and Hellbent are in Vancouver and did support work for LM3, but Square 1 also did all of those old Oddworld Switch ports. Hellbent did Lego DS games back in the day like Lego Battles. Eden were formed by ex-NLG programmers and even Chad York (what a name) from NLG IIRC dropped by to help compose Citizens of Earth back in 2015 while still at NLG. Not impossible one of them was hand picked to do the port/remaster,
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Hero of Legend
Koopa
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You'd think but it's so bizarre to keep that under wraps like that. Nintendo were fine saying they were behind Mario Strikers Battle League when asked it seemed.
APileofBananas
Tektite
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Actually I'm fairly certain we didn't find out until the Australian Classification board page was posted.
Superstarxalien
pfp by @ShiiNoctua
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nintendo didn't reveal it was retro that did prime remastered iirc. this could just be that especially since nintendo bought nlg
OctoSplattack
Tingle
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I don't think we knew. I believe we just made the educated guess of "who else would be developing a new Mario Strikers, if not the studio that makes Mario Strikers?"
Hero of Legend
Koopa
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Ah yes you're right. I checked the article I recalled; it was the Aussie rating RIGHT after the reveal:
It's Official, Next Level Games Is Developing The New Mario Strikers For Switch
'Battle League' is in safe hands
www.nintendolife.com
Coulda sworn it was Nintendo that were like "ch'yeah dude, like it's totally the creators man".
Charamiwa
Bob-omb
I realize this is reading way too much into it but the way Jon says this person was about to reveal who it was but didn't at the last minute tells me it's not NLG. If it was, that type of consideration wouldn't matter. This reads to me like revealing the devs would have garnered some attention, hence not someone obvious.
APileofBananas
Tektite
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I don't think so, Nintendo just doesn't tell us who the developers are until the games release. I don't think revealing that Princes Peach Showtime being developed by Good-Feel would've changed anything. I don't believe they officially revealed that NST was working on Mario vs Donkey Kong either, so it's not like Nintendo studios would be treated differently.
MetalLord
Paratroopa
every year nintendo does online seminars for new graduates,some madman somehow got in the call and recorded it, we been loosing so many cool things for decades
its open if someone has a japanese phone mumber and email
junglehead
Cappy
I'm fairly certain it's NLG behind it, mainly because the model being used for Luigi has been adapted and backported into LM2. This means reworking the rig to blink its 3D-sculpted eyes where the original cutscene rig commands just had some textures shift around and animate those blinking eyes instead. The lighting and rendering systems for LM2 on 3DS- and subsequently, the switch rework's updates into using light PBR- are (likely to be) fairly complex and I don't suspect anyone besides NLG would be able to comfortably rework them without extensive documentation and communication.
