Nintendo's bright future with Splatoon

[Administrator]

If you're searching for the new generation of talent within Nintendo, you needn't look much further than Tsubasa Sakaguchi. They certainly don't come much more youthful that the co-director of Splatoon, Nintendo EAD's first all-new character led game in 14 years; when we meet in a sushi house in Soho he bristles with a child-like energy and enthusiasm, his long hair tied back and his bright yellow Splatoon-themed t-shirt shining as brightly as his smiling eyes. You can sense so much of that energy in Splatoon too, a game that dances to the rhythm of youthful exuberance. New beginnings don't come much more convincing than this.
Sakaguchi's hardly new to Nintendo, though - his first credit with the company came as a character designer in 2006's Twilight Princess - and he's been well schooled in the way of Nintendo's EAD, learning the lessons of Shigeru Miyamoto. And so while the characters in Splatoon might be new, as are many of the mechanics, the craft is typical of Nintendo. If you want an oversight into the processes behind the creation of Nintendo's games, and the constant iterations that take place before we ever get to play them, there's no better place to look than one of the final Iwata Asks, carried out earlier this year, that goes into the genesis of Splatoon. "The way that Miyamoto and EAD make games, the idea comes not from the design, but from the function," observed Nintendo's late president Satoru Iwata. "The design comes after."
It's that one moment, and that one mechanic that spirals out to make a game, in other words; in Mario it's the joy of movement and momentum, and in Splatoon's case it's the simple, messy pleasure of throwing paint around. From there, it's the detail in design where you'll find much of the game, and Splatoon's eye for detail is as good as anything I've seen come out of Nintendo. Sakaguchi came up with the idea of having squids in the game - at first it was simply blocks of tofu spraying ink at each other, before they slowly evolved into rabbits - and it's that introduction that ties all of Splatoon together with a strange yet consistent logic. It makes for a game that's been hard to categorise.
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