Shigeru Miyamoto has always had a reputation for thinking outside the box, pushing back on prevalent game design trends, particularly in Nintendo’s very experimental Wii and DS eras. But his frustration with an industry chasing its own tail goes back decades. In fact, he saw the proliferation of samey games doubling down on the same concepts with increasing complexity as pretty “grotesque,” and not far off from pornography.
Yes, Miyamoto once compared popular games to porn. In a 1989 interview for a Japanese publication called Gamer Handbook, recently translated by Shmuplations, Miyamoto lamented that “games today are still based on the style of play from the 100-yen coin-op era.” Within that same “rigid framework,” everything felt like it had “hit a dead end and there’s nowhere left to go.”
That’s the kind of frustration we’ve seen come up again and again with AAA games over the years, and Miyamoto posited that games need to embrace new types of play in order to stay relevant and engaging. “If someone who was obsessed with the joy of having a pet made a game that captured that feeling, I think it would become a huge craze,” he offered as one example, predicting the popularity of Nintendogs well over a decade ahead of its launch.
I offer you this context from the interview, where Miyamoto gave a host of interesting insights into game development that seem years ahead of their time, because this next bit very much feels like a non-sequiter even within the full conversation.
“When pornography escalates, it eventually crosses into the grotesque,” Miyamoto said. “I think the world of ‘hidden secrets’ in games has almost reached that same grotesque level. It’s reached a point where it isn’t measured by common sense anymore. It’s just people getting bored and looking for stronger and stronger stimulation. We’ve hit a wall. When you’re at the point where you have no choice but to go ‘grotesque,’ you have to start thinking of new ways to use the medium.”
Why he’s singling out “hidden secrets” here isn’t entirely clear to me. Certainly, games got pretty obtuse in that era, as the likes of Zelda and Dragon Quest built an appetite for sprawling worlds with infinite secrets to find, but Miyamoto didn’t really expand on that specific part of the point. It seems he believed that a gamer’s desire for increasing complexity within the same basic genres was comparable to a porn viewer starting to seek out more “grotesque” fetishes.
Well, look, who’s going to argue with the guy who brought us Super Mario 64?
Time to dig into the best NES games of all time, if they’re not too grotesque for you.
