Producer Hisashi Nogami claims Nintendo didn’t start off trying to make a multiplayer shooter with Splatoon, but that hasn’t stopped him name checking one of Nintendo's most famous examples of the genre: Perfect Dark.
Nogami said that Splatoon began with a desire to "to not get too caught up in Nintendo's already existing franchises". Many popular genres already have at least one Nintendo property associated with them - Mario with platforming, Zelda with action adventure, Pokemon with role-playing - so staying away from them dictated Splatoon's direction as much as anything else.
"We went through a period of creating lots of prototypes," Nogami said. "We didn't want a franchise-based game, so we made a bunch of prototypes and one of those prototypes happened to be the game that became Splatoon. The idea was 'something fun, something new, something different,' not 'a shooter.'"
So if the team was trying to do something entirely new, how does Rare's grand old Perfect Dark figure into it? The same way it may well figure into your life: lots of late nights when you really should have been doing your homework.
"The development team is made up of people who play games a lot, and among them are people who play shooting games a lot, including Mr. [Yusuke] Amano, one of the game's directors, who I've heard has spent his college years playing Perfect Dark," Nogami observed.
"As game designers who play games, you can't really help observing things you like and don't like, and having those have some degree of influence on your thinking. The best way to express this is that it forms a base of thought that you bring into game development, but it doesn't directly influence the game development."
Stay tuned for more from GR+'s own David Roberts' interview with Nogami throughout the week.
