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[COLUMN] Dear Nintendo: Please Tell Us Who the Hell Is Making Your Games | by Marty Sliva
🕑 Added 2025-04-08 14:00:12 +0000 UTC
The big Switch 2 reveal event is behind us, and it feels like we have even more questions now than we did beforehand. While things like the June 5th, 2025 launch date and slew of games both exclusive as well as cross-generation have been solidified, there are smaller details that remain opaque.
Some of this will become clear in time, such as what the future holds for new installments in franchises like Zelda, Animal Crossing, and Mario. Some remain nebulous because of the current political situation in the US, such as just how much this thing is going to cost in the States and exactly when we’ll be able to pre-order it. And others will remain a mystery to anyone outside of Nintendo’s walls, such as what makes a game like Mario Kart World hit the premium $80 price, while something like Donkey Kong Bananza slides in at $70.
And it’s that last one that I want to focus on today, but not for the price reason. Rather, Donkey Kong Bananza’s impressive reveal and subsequent demos were met with the benign question of “so who is this being developed by?” And Nintendo’s response, as they’ve been doing more and more in the past few years, has been “wait until you finish the game and see the credits to find out,” which is a frankly baffling decision.
Nintendo has become weirdly secret when it comes to which teams or studios are behind certain games. For every transparent example of Tears of the Kingdom being led by Hidemaro Fujibayashi, Eiji Aonuma, and the folks at Nintendo EPD3, we get games like Super Mario RPG for Switch, Princess Peach Showtime!, The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, and Donkey Kong Country Returns HD, which are revealed and sometimes make it all the way close to release without any confirmation of who is actually developing the thing. Sometimes it’s all-but-obvious, like Grezzo evolving the style they created for the Link’s Awakening remake in Echoes of Wisdom. But other times it’s less-so, like Peach being helped by Good-Feel.
And so Donkey Kong Bananza enters that same strange liminal space as the rest of these aforementioned projects. The safe bet is that it’s the next game from EPD8, the core Mario team led by Yoshiaki Koizumi. The timing on that would make perfect sense, as Super Mario Odyssey was released back in 2017, and the smaller and more experimental Bowser’s Fury followed in 2021. The Donkey Kong Bonanza footage certainly exuded some of the same creativity and sense of progression as those previous games. Plus, Koizumi served as director of Donkey Kong Jungle Beat on the GameCube back in 2004, which would make this a bit of a homecoming for him.
However, the fact that Nintendo didn’t just come out and say it was that team lends some fuel to the theory that perhaps this isn’t the core Mario team’s next game. Maybe this is the latest project from developer Next Level Games, who reached new creative heights back in 2019 with Luigi’s Mansion 3. At this moment, it’s Schrodinger's game.
Nintendo’s handling of stuff like this feels even stranger this time around, as several other games shown off during the presentation had their creators represented front and center. Greg Kasavin from Supergiant talked about Hades II, FromSoftware’s Hidetaka Miyazaki answered questions about The Duskbloods, and Masahiro Sakurai’s involvement was used as a selling point for Kirby Air Riders.
It’s also a strange practice when compared to how the film industry handles projects like this. Just yesterday we got word that the Death Stranding movie at A24 would be produced by Lars Knudsen and Ari Aster, and written and directed by Michael Sarnoski, who previously made the excellent Pig and surprisingly great A Quiet Place: Day One. Of course, it remains to be seen whether this project actually sees the light of day, as famous figures have been attached to adaptations like BioShock, Gears of War, and Metal Gear Solid in the past, and none of those have seen the light of day. But still, there’s a level of transparency here that Nintendo could learn a thing or two from.
Part of me gets why Nintendo does this. Aside from cultural differences of not wanting to elevate the individual over the team, they feel like the quality of a given game should speak for itself, regardless of who worked on it.
But in a world where behind-the-scenes information is more readily available to the audience than ever before, folks are becoming fans of the human beings who make the things they enjoy just as much as the things themselves. Humanizing the creators can help form a bond between them and the player, which we’ve seen in everything from Cory Barlog’s long history with God of War, to Toby Fox becoming synonymous with Undertale.
This also speaks to a greater problem in the industry at large, that being how difficult it can be for individuals who work in development to actually talk about and showcase the work they’ve done in the past. NDAs, cancellations, lengthy development times, opaque roles, and a lack of knowledge on the audience’s part can lead to massive gaps on a resume that exist because a person legally can’t talk about what they were working on for months and sometimes years.
I’m not saying that a company like Nintendo has to keep us posted as to every single decision that is being made. Over the past 40 years, they’ve excelled because they marched to the beat of their own drum, and I absolutely want them to continue doing that. But if we’re entering a world where $80 can be a normal price for a new AAA game, telling us just who is working on a given project goes a small way towards making that hefty pill a bit easier to swallow.
Comments
Dan McAlister
I’m concerned about the practice because, as you said in your piece, it can be restrictive to developers to not be able to show off your work. At the same time, I’d love to see Nintendo be more explicit about their rationale. The linked article quotes Bill Trinnen as saying “We always like to start by showcasing the game and getting people focused on the gameplay, but we’ll have some information to share about the developer in due time.” But does simply stating a development studio’s name detract from focusing on gameplay? That argument is implied, but not made. Additionally, the “Kirby Air Riders” trailer stated the director’s name, but showed no gameplay. So their argument is not being uniformly applied to begin with.
Far Too Many Frogs
My first thought was that time a flat circle. Remember what happened to Atari? How developers who didn't get credited went off to form Activision? This feels like that, but far more passive.
