Flashing Neon Tomatoes

Another interesting post from Itoi’s blog that I saved a few weeks ago. At the very end of his daily post was a short, but intriguing message.

When I do things that “I absolutely need to do” in order, things that are harder to find the time to get to slowly get pushed further and further back. It’s not that I don’t think they’re important. It’s something that I definitely want to do, it’s just that I haven’t been able to start on it yet, so… yeah.

The above paragraph is my personal message to a certain someone, but I suppose it’s also pressure for myself, and an attempt to garner sympathy from my faithful readers.

The “certain person” could of course be anyone, but as most Starmen.Net followers know, we sent Itoi a huge package of stuff a while back, and he received it about two months ago. We watched the box move around his desk every few days for a while, too. It disappeared from his desk around the time he posted this message. Included in the package was a letter from me, too, so there’s always that ever-so-slight chance he was referring to us/me, though I think that’s probably not the case. But the timing and his “excuse” and his shout out to a vague someone seemed interesting to me, so I saved the post for an update like this. I leave any assumptions to you, my faithful reader

In any case, I hope he found the time to look through some of the stuff all the fans made, that’s some kickass stuff we sent

Even though I don’t do the daily Itoi blog updates anymore (I wish I could, I just don’t have the time), I still check his site everyday and save any of his posts that seems especially interesting or somewhat related to his game design stuff. I’ll post this stuff every once in a while.

Right now, here is part of his entry from March 12, 2008. In it, he talks about ideas and part of his experience first proposing MOTHER 1 to Miyamoto back in the 80s.

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March 12, 2008

“I have this incredible idea.” This is a line commonly said by interesting people who are just starting out. There was a time when even I, too, was like that and often thought such things. Even now, I may still have ideas that follow that line of thinking, but that isn’t where the issue lies.

Ideas are only heralded as “wonderful” after they’ve gone through the process of realization and completion. One can think, “Once realized, this will undoubtedly be wonderful!” But you can’t actually say that until it is realized. This is because “raw ideas” are filled to the brim with “reasons for not being realized”.

Yesterday, for the first time in a while, I spoke with a nice, young researcher about memories I’d already spoken about on many occasions. In particular, it was about when I first showed Mr. Miyamoto at Nintendo my written proposal for a video game. In my mind, I hoped Mr. Miyamoto, who I was meeting for the very first time, would read it and say, “Wow! This is great!” But instead, after reading it, he said in an almost natural manner, “Hmm, I see. We’d need to put this in game form first.” Now that I look back after all this time, his reply of, “We can tell for sure if this will be fun or not once it’s in game form,” seems like the only natural, logical answer possible.

No matter how wonderful a seed may be, it’s still nothing until it’s turned into a flower or fruit or what have you. You can’t say anything for sure until it’s at least started to show its bud. It could wither and die while it’s growing, after all.

Yet, even so, incredible ideas only begin with creative thinking.