Splatoon Proves That The Best Ideas Come From Outside Video Games
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
It is easy to understand Splatoon as a riff on prior video games. It’s a multiplayer shooter produced in the years after competitive shooters started to dominate online play. But it subverts type, offering something tuned for children and families, rather than teens and young adults. Its cartoon style and emphasis on objectives other than “kill” or “hold this position” set it apart from most other games of its ilk. But Splatoon’s originality goes deeper. It proves that the strangest and most exciting ideas emerge when you look outside of regular avenues of video games, like wildlife, pop music and street fashion, and borrow what you can from them.
Nintendo didn’t start development of Splatoon with the intention to make a family-friendly multiplayer shooter. Former CEO Satoru Iwata said in an interview the developers wanted to create “a new kind of game, without worrying about trying to fit into existing game genres.” From that initial seed came 70 ideas, which the team narrowed down to Splatoon. Its unique flavor comes in part from that wide-open approach. To be fair, this is an interview for promotional purposes, conducted by Nintendo employees with an active stake in making the best impression possible. Who knows how much of this is the unvarnished truth? But it is still striking how little video game terminology shows up and how many of the design questions raised are ones of intuition and common sense.
When you look at Splatoon’s finished product, every portion of it fits together, from how its squid characters hide in ink and how its paint-splattering mechanics pair with street art aesthetics. But it took a lot of careful thinking and iteration to get it that way. The first design that captured the dev team’s imagination featured characters covering a battlefield in ink, but these characters were tofu blocks, not squid. Why tofu? Well, the tofu’s block shape and simple colors made it disappear into the ink, turning the straightforward shooter into a tense cat-and-mouse game.
