Bloomberg has published an insightful interview with former Nintendo developer, Ken Watanabe during which he touches on a number of things, but one aspect of certain interest is Nintendo’s secretive culture. We have already know that the company only hire the best developers who are often expected to take their own intuitive with game development. Company employees often work on things in secret during down time behind the scenes and some of these projects are then turned into full scale games.
“The company culture, or whatever you’d call it, embraces people taking initiative,” Watanabe, now an independent game creator, said. “For example, it’s not unusual for someone to secretly work on something without telling their boss — like, ‘I made this in secret’ — and then it turns out to be interesting, so it gets turned into a real product.”
One particle-effect artist spent all his spare time tinkering with Nintendo’s stage editor and eventually got reassigned to do the work that drew his interest. Watanabe himself secretly built a level for Pikmin 3 that was good enough to be adopted in the final game. “In that sense, there really is a lot of freedom,” he said.
“Whether it turns out to be a blockbuster or a huge flop, the company lets you just focus on building what you believe to be fun, without distraction,” Imamura said.
