EA Says Miyamoto Has Fallen on his Job

Look, I don’t care what side of the fanboy fueled ‘console wars’ you fall on. It doesn’t matter if you can’t stand Nintendo or their franchises- if you’re a fan of video games, you’re a fan of what the company was able to accomplish consistently for two decades, even if they’ve slowed down a little in recent years. And perhaps, more than anything else, you have respect for Shigeru Miyamoto, the legendary Nintendo designer directly behind some of gaming’s biggest franchises like Mario, The Legend of Zelda, and Donkey Kong, as well as having played an influential role in others like Pokemon and Metroid Prime.

So, when an EA executive decides to criticize Nintendo’s recent policies (and they’ve done a lot of that in recent months), that’s fine. I’m not the Wii U’s biggest fan either. But when they go ahead and criticize Miyamoto, going as far as to say ‘his job has been taken over by a dead guy at Cupertino,’ which is simultaneously disrespectful not just to him, but also to another visionary of the computer age, Steve Jobs, you make me mad. Very, very mad.

EA’s chief creative officer Richard Hilleman, speaking at the DICE Europe Conference, agreed that Nintendo had had a huge role to play in gaming history. “I thank Miyamoto for that,” he said. “But he’s falling down on the job,” Hilleman added. “And for the past five years that job has been taken over by a dead guy from Cupertino.”

“We’ve asked for too much time, too much skill, and too much money, sometimes all at once,” said Hilleman.

“Customers today… are generally looking for a single fabric of play. They want their game where they want it, when they want it, and at a price they can defend to other people.”

His crassness aside, he has a point which explains the rise of smartphone and Facebook gaming; still, I wish people like him were more careful of what they said.

[GI]