Green Yoshi
Member
Too bad they didn't leak a prototype. Would have been interesting.
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Unseen 64: Nintendo's Project H.A.M.M.E.R: The Untold Story
- Thread starter Volotaire
- Start date
I agree. That was not his only comment either. His game's OT is full of responses by him and nothing he said even implied that he was a developer let alone the director of the game. He's made some great games and as somebody who adored Minis on the Move, I appreciate that. It doesn't mean his behavior wasn't shady at least though.
He needs to be clearer about who he is or he risks even the accusation of being a shill. I can understand why he's not clearer though. If I worked at Nintendo and liked spending time in a place like NeoGAF, I'd have a hard time talking about my job as well. People (including me) can be brutal and demanding. I'm sure folks begging him for changes, sequels, leaks, etc. is not something he wants. Still, it's better to be transparent about this stuff and put all mistrust to bed in my opinion.
Also, I'm sad to learn that @Doctor_Cupcakes was banned for something in that particular thread. Very unfortunate. Definitely puts a new skew on things.
Personally I liked the documentary by the way. I am sure that parts of it are true while others are skewed just like most documentaries. I wish we could get Nintendo's honest side of the story.
I had always wondered what happened to this game and that space simulation game for the Wii that was shown only one in a montage(with Zangeki no Reginleiv which NOA screwed us out of of with their children focus) and never heard of again.
Project H.A.M.M.E.R. reminds me of Malice in a lot of ways, except we didn't finally get a release at the end of its console's life.
Project H.A.M.M.E.R. reminds me of Malice in a lot of ways, except we didn't finally get a release at the end of its console's life.
DICKS AHOY
Banned
Haven't used Twitter for ages but isn't that a tweet of him apologizing?
I dunno, I flicked through his tweets and the worst he's done is complain about people complaining about him doing a video that isn't the best reflection of Nintendo's upper-management from five years back. Doesn't seem like the big tantrum a couple people are trying to make it out as.
StreetsAhead
Member
NCL is NST's parent company though, so they have every right to come in and say 'Hey, guys, this project you've been working on for three years is taking too long and doesn't work properly. Let's fix it.' I mean, ignoring the potential xenophobia and so on, it's not crazy for management to have taken action. Most businesses won't just let you dick around on something that looks mediocre at best for years in the hopes you eventually find the fun on your own.
I mean, it'd be nice if they also looked at Aonuma taking five years to make console Zelda games, or ND Cube making mediocre Mario Party games, too.
And before someone jumps on me for saying that, Splatoon has sold over 2 times as many copies as MP10 in Japan, so the team better be taking a long, hard look at themselves.
Aonuma gets a pass (managerially speaking) because he's basically delivered a Zelda game a year for a while now, and it's not like anyone else in the company can chew him out for taking a long time to make asset-intensive games when every other notable project has floundered to varying degrees.
What bothers me about NST (and to a lesser extent, Retro) is that NCL seems reluctant to ever take them out of their chokehold, so we'll never know if they have what it takes to deliver a compelling, original title ever again.
What bothers me about NST (and to a lesser extent, Retro) is that NCL seems reluctant to ever take them out of their chokehold, so we'll never know if they have what it takes to deliver a compelling, original title ever again.
Except that Nintendo was (understandably) on a "Wiimote" kick at the time, and they apparently mandated a control scheme, and the devs realized that the control scheme was the problem, but when the game's director tried to change the controls, the game's producers overruled him, and claimed that the graphics were the problem.
Xenophobia apparently comes into the picture when the producers (all Japanese) tell the developers that they don't understand the control direction coming down to them from above because they're "not Japanese".
Then the graphics were overhauled as instructed, and the game still wasn't fun, so the producers put all the blame on the director, canned the game, and fired him, without admitting that they were the ones cocking the game up (allegedly).
StreetsAhead
Member
Right, management absolutely did cock up in this case, if the story is true. But, I felt that the post I was responding to felt it was unacceptable for management to even try to step in at all, which is mostly what I was responding to.
cooljeanius
Member
...and now he's gone and edited all of his old posts, so I can't really verify... Anyone got an archive link?
People should let this one go. It's his job he has to protect.
If your talking about xenophobia I can't understand why you can't imagine those feelings being directed toward a mostly caucasian dev team, its cultural not race based conflict. Also if you truly can't figure out why an issue like this would go underneath notice then I don't really have much to say.
DICKS AHOY
Banned
God this thread keeps getting bizarrely dramatic for what seemed like a pretty generic action game.
The concept was decent but the reviews from the hands on seemed like the game was pretty mediocre. I remember thinking that Project HAMMER and Disaster Day of Crisis were going to be two core games for the Wii early on in it's lifespan. When they were shown off in 2006 and 2007 at E3 if I am not mistaken, I thought they would be some new IP's Nintendo would pour out for that generation.
HAMMER got quietly dropped. and Disaster came out and it was eh, it kind of lost some steam for the Wii as far as producing newer IP's that would be compelling.
HAMMER got quietly dropped. and Disaster came out and it was eh, it kind of lost some steam for the Wii as far as producing newer IP's that would be compelling.
FalsettoVibe
Member
Game didn't look that good anyway.
The Maverick
Member
You're...kidding, right?
The video itself says there was a review or audit of the work conditions there. It's not like upper management was pretending everything was A-OK. If there was a serious issue related to the matter and it didn't come up in the review, then it's on the staff for saying nothing, not because they were protecting management's behavior. My issue isn't that it wouldn't happen, it's that it would happen without serious reprimands as the video implied.
If it were found to be happening as reported, it would open Nintendo up to serious litigation, plain and simple, so no, letting it slide isn't an option. If there's one thing Nintendo hates, it's lawsuits against them, even civil suits.
Or do you seriously think that there's some sort of a massive conspiracy/cover-up? Because that's outright paranoia at that point and makes accusing me of naivety seem quaint.
Aw man... That's sad. Dude is probably dropping GAF forever I bet too. I never wanted that. I sent @Doctor_Cupcakes a couple of screenshots on Twitter earlier today if you want to track those down. They were just samples though.
Terrible_Majesty
Member
NOA needs to grow some balls like Sega of America did. They need a Tom Kalinske like figure to step up and cater to NA audiences.
I'd be curious in what you thought would happen. Not hard to see where this was going when the narrative changed from HAMMER to LiamR and this.
Common sense.
He got banned for posting an antisemitic caricature of Sarkeesian and being obtuse about it.
I missed that. I only read his post on here in that regard.
It is another instance of where he at first couldn't see how his behaviour could affect others. I wrote nothing of tantrums.
Aonuma also is a (senior?) producer on Zelda, not director.
Well let's hope LiamR handles those oh, wait
Can anyone answer this?
Great summary.
Blame shifting and scapegoating are universal in human group dynamics, as are xenophobia and racism. So I would not be surprised to see it crop up in a failed project.
Or we can blame it on motion controls, lol.
in all honesty, someone working for nintendo shouldn't have any nonapproved social media presence if they want to keep their job, let alone post on gaf. They are pretty controlling.
Anyone remember the name of the guy they muzzled and wanted to have someone in pr pretend to be him on twitter etc before he quit because he tweeted that he wasn't a fan of region lock?
Shikamaru Ninja
任天å ã® å¿è
Nintendo is a Japanese company, and every game has several producers from associate, studio, general to executive. It's inescapable.
I don't think the director was fired. Nintendo is not that kind of company. There was definitely an exodus of staff, including some of the EAD guys that came from Japan to join NST.
Dan Adelman
The video doesn't just imply that it happens, but states it outright, and that the producers/management who are routinely blamed by the former staff in the video walked away without a scratch.
I won't deny the chance of xenophobia and cultural discrepancies affecting the project, but Nintendo has worked for many years with different western studios, and these problems haven't arised before: Rareware, Retro, Next Level Games, Silicon Knights, Monster Games. I'd really like to hear both sides of the story, though it probably won't ever happen.
Agreed 100%.
Agreed 100%.
thomasmahler
Member
To be honest, the gameplay there looks terrible and it's probably a good thing that it got canceled.
The more I think about it, the more I agree with the higher-ups at Nintendo who tried to fix the game by enhancing the environments. Look at a game like Madworld. That game, like Project Hammer, was a fairly basic brawler whose gameplay mostly consists of using a combination of button and motion-controlled attacks against a bunch of fairly nondescript enemies. So what makes it stand out? The combination of an extremely distinctive art style with highly interactive environments that give you a huge variety of fun ways to kill your enemies. I obviously never got to play Project Hammer, but it seems more to me like the problem with the game stemmed not from the controls (which appear to work well in the video, and based on many other Wii games employing a similar control scheme which turned out to work well), but on the fact that the level design was really bland and didn't show any sort of variety or creativity in the combat encounters. If they had toned down the motion controls while keeping the same caliber environments and level design, you know what they would have ended up with? Something along the lines of Spyborgs. I think we can all agree that Madworld was a much better game than Spyborgs.
the higer-ups mandated motion controls, so yeah, they kinda fucked the game from the get go.
May sound repetitious, but we're getting only one side of the story here. The concept itself doesn't sound too hot from the start.
But motion controls weren't necessarily a problem with the game and often times make games better and more fun to play, as evidenced by Wii games like Madworld, Godfather, Scarface, and dozens more.
He would have been fine if he hadn't outed himself. He can frolic around the internet as long as he keeps it private.
Investigating forum members in order to make vague attempts at character assassination tend to do that.
Schnozberry
Member
What I'm getting from this is that the game was shit, nobody knew how to fix it, and everybody started pointing fingers as the whole thing went down in flames. Seems like a pretty typical project management failure.
Dan didn't quit over region locking, nor did Nintendo fire him over his comments about it. You get reprimanded for that, not fired. Bill tweets some of the weirdest, most random stuff and openly supports the fans or jokes on twitter over stuff, you don't see him getting fired over it (nevermind all the wonky stuff that Treehouse will openly tweet from their personal accounts). Iwata doesn't fire himself when he addresses region locking and the fact that fans are vocally against it on the 3DS/WiiU.
The reason he left/was removed, was because the whole back-end of their digital store front/presence got re-evaluated and re-organized. He put in a lot of terrible practices to the eShop, and a lot of the better things to come of NoA's initiatives (Humble, Nindies, cross-buy, not drip-feeding releases) all came from Damon Baker after he took over.
Adelman did, at least, get rid of a lot of the red tape and authorization indies needed to publish on the eShop and outsourced the approval process therein. In the past, you needed to submit proper identification of your work place, show that it was an actual office, etc, before you were allowed to submit for publication.
I didn't see the posts from the NST director guy aside from the first one in this thread, and that one wasn't really offensive. Something like "the article gets some things right, some things wrong". It implied that he knew what he was talking about, so that itself wasn't dishonest.
If the problem was in threads for other NST games, maybe he just didn't want his identity to get out (like a lot of people on the Internet) and couldn't resist posting about a game he had overseen. Did he actually post anything that suggested that he was intentionally astroturfing?
If the problem was in threads for other NST games, maybe he just didn't want his identity to get out (like a lot of people on the Internet) and couldn't resist posting about a game he had overseen. Did he actually post anything that suggested that he was intentionally astroturfing?
The biggest offender is cited in this thread, really.
Mr. Pointy
Member
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7WNYpOJ0y4
The story continues. Trying to bullet point the more interesting points.
The story continues. Trying to bullet point the more interesting points.
- It was intended to be a Dynasty Warriors-like game with a Western twist.
- The story was planned first, the reverse of how Nintendo build their games.
- Megaman-style boss structure.
- The CG cutscenes were done quite early and cost a lot, which hampered the rest of production. Miyamoto and NCL was pissed about that.
- Main character was supposed to be a silent protagonist.
- Katsuhiko Kanno was the first director of the game and he allegedly was one of the major causes of tension between Western staff and NCL staff. He was apparently kicked back to NCL after Mario Clock DS as a form of punishment.
- There was a 'culture of scapegoating' during Kanno's turn at the helm. More than half NST's staff left during this time.
- The game being turned into Wii Crush was an attempt to control the ballooning budget.
TriggerShy
Member
Story before gameplay seems to be what hurt this project the most, since they couldn't change much after it.
Finale Fireworker
Member
I'm fine with making a story first and laying your game on top of it. I don't think that's necessarily a problem. Incredible games like Last of Us obviously prioritize story. Which isn't to say Project HAMMER would have held a candle to Naughty Dog's modern work, of course, just that it's not some kind of doomed to fail approach to game development. It has been successful before.
However, this is not how Nintendo makes games. The very idea seems offensive to them. There is nothing less important than story in Nintendo's games.
So I am not surprised that this happened.
However, this is not how Nintendo makes games. The very idea seems offensive to them. There is nothing less important than story in Nintendo's games.
So I am not surprised that this happened.
Not75Drops
Member
Wow I remember seeing gameplay for this back on a DVD back when I started getting gaming magazines. It seems like Kanno was a major problem, along with making the story/CG cutscenes first. I'm glad he wasn't let off the hook completely. It looks like Mario vs DK actually saved NST in the long run.
AcademicSaucer
Member
NOA really needs more studios .