Retro Studios Talks About Getting To Where They Are Today
Posted on May 31 2011 by Nathanial Rumphol-Janc
Retro Studios is a big upcoming developer for Nintendo. In fact, many would already say they’re beyond just “upcoming”. Retro Studies develop exclusively for Nintendo, and have provided such titles as the Metroid Prime Trilogy, and more recently, Donkey Kong Country Returns.
Retro has a big future ahead of them, but President Michael Kelbaugh insists that while they’ve come a long way, they still have a lot to learn. He attributes their success to mentorship from Nintendo. Read on for his quotes.
It’s patience, mentorship—a lot of mentorship, a lot of help from our friends at Nintendo. It’s investing in the right people. It takes time. There’s not a book that I could say, “Read this and you’ll know how to make Nintendo games.” You learn how to do it by experience, and that’s really, experience and mentorship. That’s really the only way you do it.
It takes a lot of time and a lot of investment and, again, it’s getting the right people. You have to hire people that are motivated by making quality product, not by how many units they sell. So it’s really as simple as that, but it’s not simple at all. It takes a lot of work. Ten, years, well 12 years, and we’ve made a lot of progress, but we don’t have it down yet. We still have a lot to learn, you know. It changes. As the industry evolves, so do the demands of the developer, so it’s not easy, and there are not a lot of developers that really get it.
Source: Nintendo Life
