There was a Nintendo game that involved plying leagues of "blue ocean" long before Nintendo borrowed those words from authors W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne to describe what it was up to with the groundbreaking Wii in the mid-2000s. It's a game I've reluctantly confessed to Nintendo legend Shigeru Miyamoto that I spent more time playing than Super Mario 64, the latter only ousted from the pinnacle of all-time best lists by Tetris and Nintendo's own The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. It was called Wave Race 64, and it happens to be one of the first games Shinya Takahashi worked on.
"It was my first step, really, into game development," Takahashi tells me via a translator, describing the explorative period in the mid-1990s when Nintendo was making its paradigmatic leap from the 16-bit 2D graphics of the Super Nintendo to the Nintendo 64's state-of-the-art 3D vistas. Wave Race 64 arrived shortly after the Nintendo 64's September 1996 debut, showcasing the system's visual prowess by letting players jet-ski across astonishingly naturalistic waves, their plausible swells and dips made possible by a then-unprecedented custom Silicon Graphics chip.
"The reason I wound up on Wave Race was because of my work in 3D graphics," Takahashi explains. "It all started sitting down with these engineers who only had experience with the Famicom and the Super Famicom [the Japanese names for Nintendo's 8-bit NES and 16-bit Super NES consoles] and the 2D graphics there. We just plopped an SGI [Silicon Graphics, Inc.] machine in front of them and sat down and said, 'How are we going to make something with this?'"
Takahashi was already donning different hats, both designing and coordinating work by the rest of the team. "It didn't matter whether they were new or they'd been here for years, we had the engineers working with the designers, all lined up at the same starting point with zero experience. And then I was helping to pull them along," he says. According to Takahashi, it was he and Yoshiaki Koizumi who effectively pulled Nintendo into the 3D era, essentially thanks to their enthusiasm for 3D graphics.
