Koji "IGA" Igarashi leaves Konami

[nakamura]

Only great 3d castlevania in history was IGA's lament of innocence, although, curse of darkness is about as good as nanobreaker, probably should of been canned. The majority of his 2d castlevanias are Godly. Portrait of ruin was the only mediocre one.

Lament is a very good game. A.little short and linear but good combat, great graphics, epic.bosses and amazing music.

[Yakumo]

SNES and Konami were a match made in heaven. Second only to Nintendo l.

Nintendo don't actually make that many games. Many are outsourced. All Kirby games (better than Mario IMO) are by Hal and the Mario Party Games are by Hudson or at least were at one point. Nintendo only make a few games in house even in the days of the SFC whereas Konami made so many it was hard to keep count.

[fuse]

He's got a talk lined up for GDC this week. I have money prepared to be thrown at Kickstarter.

[sj33]

Nintendo don't actually make that many games. Many are outsourced. All Kirby games (better than Mario IMO) are by Hal and the Mario Party Games are by Hudson or at least were at one point. Nintendo only make a few games in house even in the days of the SFC whereas Konami made so many it was hard to keep count.

Indeed. Donkey Kong has obviously been outsourced since the mid-90s and remains so, Metroid is of course outsourced these days, as were the most recent iterations of Starfox and F-Zero until they were seemingly dropped. The only significant in-house games they make anymore of Mario and sometimes Zelda.

Pretty worrying for a company that supposedly relies heavily on its first party titles.

[Wools]

wow, 2001. That's 13 years ago. Maybe longer than some of the readers of this post have been alive hahaha.

I was 16 then & had just saved up enough cash from my part time job at Waitrose to buy a brand new PS2...

That feels almost like yesterday! There was so much goodness coming out of Japan then, I hope this new generation kicks off a new wave of something like has happened in the West. Loads of small Japanese indie games & great ideas flooding the market again.

[Guts]

Indeed. Donkey Kong has obviously been outsourced since the mid-90s and remains so, Metroid is of course outsourced these days, as were the most recent iterations of Starfox and F-Zero until they were seemingly dropped. The only significant in-house games they make anymore of Mario and sometimes Zelda.

Pretty worrying for a company that supposedly relies heavily on its first party titles.

That's not quite the same as many are their subsidiaries which they own, so they work in close collaboration with them. Intelligent Systems, Monolith Soft, Retro Studios and few others are all owned by Nintendo as was obviously Rare (partly at least) back in the SNES/N64 days. They also work with these devs who work exclusively with Nintendo ("2nd party") like Alpha Dream and Next Level Games (Luigi's Mansion 2).

Nintendo has heavy input and quality control with all of their games (maybe not New Yoshi's Island though) and I'm 100% sure that a big part of Rare's success in the 90's came from the help from Nintendo, same can be said about companies like Silicon Knights.

[nakamura]

Exactly. Nintendo general have or have had very heavy control over games from their IP. Star Fox had major input from them despite a lot of the technical work being by Argonaut.

Regardless. Mario World, Pilotwings, F-Zero. Mario Kart, All Stars, Super Metroid and Yoshi's Island are best of genre games.