Yokoi: When I ask myself why things are like this today, I wonder if it isn’t because we’ve run out of ideas for games. Recent games take the same basic elements from older games, but slap on characters, improve the graphics and processing speed… basically, they make games through a process of ornamentation. That’s where we’re at with console games today, but I believe there are still more basic varieties of competitive gameplay to be discovered.
I said the same thing when I quit Nintendo and started my own company, Koto Laboratory; however, when it came down to it and the staff asked me “well, what should we do then?”, in reality I found it to be extremely difficult to think of new things. But when we released the keychain game
Kunekuneccho, which is really an old style game, and it was commercially successful, then I felt like my ideas were somewhat vindicated.