Shigeru Miyamoto wanted the SNES to be an indie powerhouse a full 10 years ahead of its time
A recently translated interview with Shigeru Miyamoto has shed some light on Nintendo's plans to make a major SNES peripheral a haven for indie devs - a full decade before indie gaming on consoles would become a proper reality.
That peripheral was the Satellaview, a satellite modem for the SNES's Japanese equivalent, the Super Famicom. The Satellaview would essentially let you download games and other media to your console through satellite broadcasts, making you tune in at certain times to get the latest entry in a given series. The peripheral was successful enough for these broadcasts to run for several years in Japan, and with much of that content seemingly lost to time, gaming preservationists and historians have been digging deep to save everything they can of the Satellaview's legacy.
It seems Nintendo had even bigger plans in mind for the Satellaview. In a 1995 interview recently translated by Time Extension, Shigeru Miyamoto said that "Satellaview offers us the possibility to distribute content for free that might otherwise be difficult to sell. Something like that would incur a high cost if we were to try to sell it on the current cartridge standard, but if we only had to send the data, distribution becomes much more doable." That kind of consideration is exactly what led to the dual rise of digital distribution and indie gaming in the Xbox 360 and PS3 generation.
"Consider also a situation where a student brings in a piece of software, something we can't sell for 8,000 yen," Miyamoto said. "If the creator were to consent to distribution, we could theoretically have 100,000 people playing their game. There are many opportunities for that sort of thing to happen with Satellaview. There were also some cases in
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