Tweet
Shigesato Itoi cried, so the story goes, on the way home from his first meeting with Shigeru Miyamoto, after Nintendo's most famous game designer had rejected Itoi's idea for a video game. At the time, Itoi was famous across Japan or his work as a slogan writer, the Nipponese Don Draper. In 1981 he co-authored a collection of short stories with the country's most successful contemporary novelist, Haruki Murakami, while his 1983 slogan for a Woody Allen-fronted advertising campaign for the Seibu Department store remains one of the Japanese advertising industry's best known. As well as providing voice acting for the seminal Studio Ghibli film, My Neighbour Totoro, Itoi wrote each of the movie studio's film taglines and even co-wrote songs with the Oscar-winning composer Ryuichi Sakamoto. For this kind of multi-disciplinarian creative force, the emergence of the video game medium presented a beguiling opportunity.But it was Nintendo that first approached Itoi in 1987 to ask if he'd consider writing the advertising slogan for one of its games. He agreed on the condition he could pitch his own game idea to the company. Itoi's significant artistic achievements did not move Miyamoto, however, who dismissed him as just another celebrity with a commercial interest in games, not an artistic one. Reportedly, when Nintendo's CEO Hiroshi Yamauchi heard how Itoi - whom he considered a genius - had been slighted, he instructed a reproached Miyamoto to call the prospective designer back to tell him that his game idea had been green-lit.
Itoi, uninterested in the knights, castles and dragons of the Japanese RPGs of the time, wanted to create a game set in a small American town, filled with contemporary props, cultural references and a quest revolving around the recovery of a series of scattered melodies. Itoi, who had grown up forbidden from seeing his divorced mother named the game - released for the Famicom in 1989 - simply 'Mother'.
Read more…
More...