Another fantastic NVC podcast by IGN. Jose has been killing it with the interviews lately. Perrin Kaplan, Julian Eggebrecht, and Dyack, among others.
For anyone interested in Nintendo history at all (specifically during the 64/Cube/Wii eras), you really need to check out the most recent podcasts.
I hesitate to even write up tidbits b/c if you're interested at all, you really should give it a listen. Here are a few to whet your appetite (going from memory)....
- Eternal Darkness was originally built for the N64 and was looking great. SK was very proud of how the game was running and how it looked. Even Nintendo was impressed, as SK did it all without the expansion pak. A time came where Nintendo started forcing all projects to be moved to the Cube and thus, SK had to rebuild the game.
- Eternal Darkness was nearly cancelled after 9/11 happened. The game was pretty much done, but there were some Arabic centurions in the game and no one felt comfortable putting it out.
- Nintendo granted them an extra 6 months and they rewrote many of the questionable parts. In the end, Dyack thinks it resulted in a better game because they had more time to polish and to add insanity effects.
- Nintendo at first was adamantly against the
insanity effect. Nintendo feared it would result in players breaking their systems and controllers out of frustration. Dyack fought for it and Nintendo ultimately agreed. They even prepared for extra repairs and support calls.
He talked about pitching it to Nintendo and how they were on board at first. There was a time during the 64/Cube era where they wanted to make games that appealed to more mature audiences, which resulted in Eternal Darkness.
As the Cube era ended, Nintendo wanted to focus more on family/party games. They asked Denis if he would be interested in making a party game and he said he could do it, but he didn't think it would be very good and it wasn't his passion. He felt he owed it to them to tell the truth and part amicably. He had nothing but good things to say about Nintendo, but said it just wouldn't have made the most sense to put Too Human on Wii with the shift/refocus Nintendo was planning.