Some questions concerning Intelligent Systems

Some questions concerning Intelligent Systems

nintendo-nerd (guest) 25 Jan 2014 14:21

Hello there,
I'm currently researching on the topic of Intelligent Systems to write an article about the studio for a German Nintendo website. There are still some questions left and I think there is no better place to ask them than here. ;)

1) On the history section of IS's homepage it is noted that in November 1987, Nintendo and IS founded a subsidiary called "Tech Co. Ltd." or "TEC". The company was closed in March 1997 and its 60 employees started working at IS. According to the GDRI (gdri dot smspower dot org/wiki/index.php/TEC), TEC developed tools (like IS) and programmed games like Super Metroid which are widely regarded as programmed by IS. This doesn't seem to be widely known; do you know anything more about TEC?

2) There is much confusion about IS's incorporation and it's really hard to find out what the correct story is. It is said that IS started out with Toru Narihiro converting Famicom games to the NES, but in the credits of games like Metroid, there are other IS programmers mentioned. Did they really "split out" of R&D1, as often mentioned? Who was their president before Toshiyuki Nakamura, who seems to be in that position since April 2010?

3) According to their homepage, IS was founded in December 1986, but there are pre-1986 games like Tennis, Soccer or Duckhunt listed on the "games" section. Because Soccer was evidently programmed by Iwasaki Giken, GDRI thinks (gdri dot smspower dot org/wiki/index.php/Blog:1#The_True_Origins_of_Intelligent_Systems.3F) that Iwasaki might have been the predecessor to IS. This adds to the confusion about IS's fundation. Is there anything you can tell me about this circumstances?

If you could give me additional information on these topics, I would be really happy about that!

Re: Some questions concerning Intelligent Systems

Kyoto Ninja 25 Jan 2014 18:25

Here is what I've learned or can sort strongly speculate on

1. It gets very hard to distinguish the differences between Iwasaki Electronics, Intelligent Systems, and TEC. At the end of the day, it pretty much is all the same company but it seems like they were trying to create sometype of funding method and copyright distribution within those. It isn't too different than all those weird RARE spinoffs that Nintendo owned aside from Rare LTD.

2. IS (Iwasaki/IS/TEC) basically is one of four programming companies Nintendo teamed up with in the 80s. Masayuki Uemura and Nintendo R&D2 contracted SRD Co., Ltd., Intelligent Systems, HAL Laboratory, and Pax Soft Nica to co-develop technologies. Basically this is how those companies became involved in the game programming of EAD and R&D1 and R&D2 games. Technically, R&D2 is the co-programmer of every Famicom game as they were involved in the hard metal stuff.

Balloon Fight is a good example. R&D2 developed the middleware, HAL programmed the arcade version, and SRD (which was kind of EAD's main programming team) programmed the NES version. So it was an R&D1 designed game (Yoshio Sakamoto's baby), but see how complicated the programming was. I mean you had R&D2 creating middleware, HAL programming the arcade version, and SRD programming the NES version.

While SRD was EAD's main programming team, IS became R&D1's main programming team. IS "co-programmed Metroid" according to Sakamoto (again, referencing R&D2 technology as the technology partner). R&D1's programmers mainly handled Game Boy games, so IS programmers helped the R&D1 designers on console games (since they were doing the tools). Make sense?

Re: Some questions concerning Intelligent Systems

Kyoto Ninja 25 Jan 2014 18:29

One big difference is the business relationship.

SRD and Nintendo worked a deal where SRD allocated their programming group inside Nintendo's office, and they would operate as one of EAD's two programming departments.

IS and Nintendo worked a deal where IS also received internal office space and operated as a helper to R&D1/SPD. Although IS sort of invoked co-copyright authorship and logo marketing. IS also started sub-developing some of their own ideas as well (Pushmo for example).

nintendo-nerd (guest) 28 Jan 2014 15:27

Thanks, that was really helpful!

nintendo-nerd (guest) 23 Mar 2014 14:13

The article is published: nintendo-online dot de/artikel/report/16553/inside-nintendo-36-intelligent-systems-die-unbekannte-geschichte-des-fire-emblem-studios

Again, thank you for your help. I "special credit'ed" you in the article ;)