Nintendo veteran Takaya Imamura has chatted with Games Radar about what he believes makes a great game and he doesn’t believe that budget has anything to do with it. Imamura told the site that “the best games” happen simply because of “the best ideas.” Mr. Imamura, left Nintendo in 2021 after working at the Kyoto-based company for over three decades, helping create a number of iconic video games.
“So compared to EU and the US, the budget for a so-called AAA game over here in comparison, is a lot smaller,” he explains. “The same for films as well.”
Some could consider this a limitation, but Imamura doesn’t believe that huge budgets necessarily go hand in hand with producing “great” games in the first place. “I don’t think that necessarily having a big, huge budget means that you can make a great game,” he continues.
“I really do think that games, the best games, are down to the best ideas, and I think Japanese game creators are able to work within those restraints as they were, but they can come to play, so to speak, with ideas that can trump the bigger budgets.”
