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| Yoshiki Okamoto: The Clown Prince of Gaming | | By Steven Kent for Screenager Central |
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Technically speaking, Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of the Mario and Zelda games, is not a celebrity. On the most part, people do not recognize Miyamoto when he walks down the street, and he can go to the store without attracting attention.
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Miyamoto's face may never appear on the cover of the National Enquirer, although he is one of the most successful entertainers in the world. He has not sold as many games as Stephen King has sold books (Miyamoto has sold over 130 million Mario games worldwide, King has sold over 250 million books); but Super Mario Brothers, Miyamoto's all-time bestseller, has sold as well as Michael Jackson's Thriller album and Alanis Morrisette's Jagged Little Pill combined.
Yoshiki Okamoto is not a household name either; but he produced Street Fighter II, a game that earned more money in arcades than Jurassic Park made in movie theaters.
There was a time when game industry pundits believed that game designers such as Mark Harris and Bill Budge would one day be as famous as rock stars. That has not come to pass. Instead, with few exceptions, game designers have become more anonymous than ever. One of the premises behind the creation of Electronic Arts was that the company's games would have album covers and the company's top designers would be stars. That notion has all but disappeared.
One of the reasons that designers are not stars is that the process of making video games has evolved over the last 25 years. In the early days, the act of designing a game was mostly a one-man job. The team that created Donkey Kong included the late Gumpei Yokoi as a hardware consultant; five programmers; a music composer; and Miyamoto designing the art, the characters, and the levels.
When Okamoto created his first game, Time Pilot, he worked independently too. His boss had told him to create a driving game and made him turn in design documents every night to show his progress. The freethinking Okamoto wanted to make a flying combat game. Even as he showed his boss the documentation for a game about earning a driver's license, Okamoto gave his programmers directions to build a free-scrolling shooter.
The clown prince of game designers, Yoshiki Okamoto is the only one of the top echelon game designers in this article ever to be fired from his job. Okamoto began his career at the age of 20 when he was hired by Konami to draw game posters. Apparently anxious to employ him, Konami hired Okamoto right out of school in December, 1982. (Ideally, Japanese students graduate in March and begin their jobs in April.)
Though he cannot prove it, Okamoto believes his employers wanted him to work on video games from the start. His first job was to create poster art for the arcade game Tutankhamen. Whether he planned to have Okamoto make games or simply wanted him as an artist, Okamoto's boss asked him to work on a game a few months after hiring him.
As mentioned earlier, Okamoto's first game was supposed to be a driving game in which players tried to earn a driver's license by steering a car through erratic traffic. The game did not interest him.
Okamoto wanted to make a flying game in which players controlled a futuristic fighter as it battled aircraft from different eras; but his boss was adamant that he work on the driving game. Knowing the wily Okamoto might ignore his orders, Okamoto's boss insisted on daily reports to prove the driving game would come in on schedule.
Okamoto says that he gave his boss daily reports on the driving game while giving his programmers instructions for building a flying game.
"I wanted to make a game in which things start off easy and the enemy gets harder and harder to destroy," says Okamoto. "The planes back in the first stage, World War I planes, [are easy to beat] compared to today's planes. I wanted to emphasize the time periods and the kind of planes they used, and that the more futuristic planes were stronger."
Konami's executives recognized Okamoto's game, Time Pilot, as a winner as soon as he unveiled it, temporarily preserving Okamoto's job. Of course success is seldom an orphan. One night as Okamoto was leaving the office, he overheard his boss speaking with a top executive.
"Time Pilot was completely different from the game I was supposed to do," says Okamoto. "My boss told me, 'See, like I told you before, this game is doing pretty good,' because he wanted to behave as if he made the game or something."
"One night the boss was talking to one of the big shots [in the company] and called me over. He was saying that Time Pilot was successful because of his instructions, and [yet] he didn't do a thing on it. I wanted to kill the guy."
Okamoto's next game, Gyruss, was also a success, but his time at Konami was about to end.
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