Secrets of Nintendo

Read on for a taste of the future. Warning: may smack of speculation...

Words: NGamer UK

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Jan 4, 2008

Nintendo are masters of illusion, hiding some of the biggest games-to-be from the public eye with the kind of skill that’d turn even David Blaine into a how-dey-do-dat. Try looking into their top hat and all you’ll find is Reggie Fils-Aime uttering a nuh-uh and waving a bar chart to distract you from any gaming rabbits that may be inside. Simply put: you’ll only know when Nintendo want you to know.

Scour the net and you’ll see just how watertight Nintendo’s secrets ship is. New games are never broken by a single news source, but delivered simultaneously to the doorsteps of every journalistic outlet lucky enough to be in Nintendo’s contacts book. Even those websites with Nostradamus levels of insider prescience - we’re looking at you, Surfer Girl - have never got their mitts on info from the belly of this particular beast.

Legally, Nintendo personnel are bound with ironclad NDAs (non-disclosure agreements); a single signature gagging you for the foreseeable future. But it goes further, with a need-to-know approach cloaking the simplest of details. As Katsuya Eguchi - a director at Nintendo EAD - said of the remote speaker, “the only people who knew were the sound designer and the hardware designer, and those people who were very close to the project.”

Now picture the hundreds of game designers and publicity bods not in the know about this fundamental part of the remote, and the effort of secret-keeping becomes clear.