If you’ve ever played a Nintendo game, you’ll likely have come across the work of The Golden
Triangle.
Nintendo’s secret weapons, three developers have been with the company since the Famicom
era, and have lent their talents to a vast array of titles across many different gaming
genres.
Shigeru Miyamoto, Toshihiko Nakago, and Takashi Tezuka, have formed the foundation for many
of your favourite Nintendo games, and their continued contributions have shaped the way
the company functions in the modern era.
Theirs is a story of friendship, teamwork, and occasional arguments.
Of how three friends with very little experience ended up defining an entire emerging art form.
This is the story of The Golden Triangle, the three people who built Nintendo.
According to the late Satoru Iwata, Nintendo’s early success came from a “dream team”
of three talented developers.
Nicknamed The Golden Triangle, these three creators were responsible for a lot of the
big hits that defined Nintendo’s 8-Bit era, and they’ve continued to hold prominent
roles in the company ever since.
Shigeru Miyamoto is by far the most famous member of The Golden Triangle, and he often
gets the credit for coming up with many of the big ideas for Nintendo’s games.
Shigeru initially joined Nintendo as the company’s first artist, and worked with early programmers
and developers to create Donkey Kong, among other arcade classics.
Shigeru often gets a lot of credits for his contributions to gaming.
But just as important are his two co-creators, Toshihiko Nakago and Takashi Tezuka.
These two men worked on the vast majority of Nintendo’s early games, including, importantly,
Super Mario Bros. Interestingly, neither of them started out
as gaming enthusiasts.
Toshihiko Nakago was originally hired by Nintendo to work on programming for the Famicom games
console, known as the Nintendo Entertainment System in the West.
Toshihiko was a programmer at heart, and had experience working with a key computer chip
that was central to the working of the Famicom.
As such, he was hired more for his technical expertise than for any insight into making
games.
As one of the only people at the company at the time who actually understood how the Famicom’s
computer chip worked, Toshihiko was set to work porting arcade games onto the console.
He built the NES version of titles like Donkey Kong and Balloon Fight.
This was a very difficult process.
Toshihiko had to bend a game that had been designed for state-of-the-art arcade hardware,
and condense it so that it could fit onto a far less advanced home console.
Some things, such as character movement, had to be entirely reworked in order to make things
fit together.
Just as all this port work was wrapping up, someone tapped Toshihiko on the shoulder and
introduced himself, announcing that the pair would be working on a new game, Excitebike,
together.
Toshihiko didn’t have a clue who this person was, but he later learned that this was none
other than Shigeru himself, the creator of many of the games that Toshihiko had been
porting to the Famicom.
Takashi Tezuka was not exactly a video gaming expert when he first applied to work at Nintendo.
He and a friend were looking for jobs at the same time, and they applied to the fledgling
game studio in the hopes of getting to work together.
This wasn’t meant to be, Takashi’s friend sadly didn’t make the cut.
But having earned a place at Nintendo, Takashi had a lot of homework to do.
He immediately rushed out to buy a Famicom, as he figured he probably needed one to understand
what his job was about.
Takashi was surprised to discover that this was a games console – he’d thought it
was some sort of home computer!
Takashi joined with the already established Shigeru Miyamoto, working on a game called
Devil World.
While Takashi had never even heard of Pac-Man before joining Nintendo, he now found himself
making a game that borrowed heavily from this famous title.
Then, once Devil World was completed, the trio came together to work on Excitebike,
their first game together.
Toshihiko describes their collaborative process thusly: Shigeru starts off by digging a hole.
Takashi then finds some way to fill this hole.
Then, right at the end, Toshihiko make sure it's smooth and solid by pushing a roller
over the soil.
Shigeru was the ideas man.
He’d come up with the broad strokes of what a game would be about, and he’d have a lot
of the ideas about how gameplay should work and what things should look like.
Takashi was the designer who put this into practice.
He figured out the layout of levels and the placement of elements within the game.
Then, it was up to Toshihiko to program the game together.
He and Shigeru would often argue over what elements should be included in a game, as
while Shigeru would come up with plenty of engaging ideas, Toshihiko needed to worry
about the limitations of the hardware and the amount of data that could be fitted into
a cartridge.
Luckily, Toshihiko had help from a very talented mentor.
There was a fourth member of the Golden Triangle, albeit one who was only involved in an advisory
capacity.
While very few people at the company understood how the Famicom’s internal chip worked,
there was one person who could help: Satoru Iwata, then a programmer at another company,
HAL Laboratory.
When Satoru first visited Nintendo’s office in Kyoto, he got the impression that he must
have been the only person in the building who actually understood how the Famicom worked.
Upon meeting Toshihiko, Satoru did his best to educate his colleage.
HAL Laboratory worked on the port of Balloon Fight alongside Nintendo, and so, Toshihiko
and Satoru spent plenty of time together.
During that time, Satoru taught Toshihiko everything he knew, trying to help him get
to grips with his difficult job.
At one point, after a long discussion with Satoru, Toshihiko returned to his desk to
be berated by Shigeru.
“Why do you have to go to another company to find this stuff out?!” asked Shigeru
with exasperation.
In later years, Satoru would express disappointment that of all the Nintendo franchises, he never
got the chance to work on a Mario game.
When he said this, Toshihiko reminded him that the lessons Satoru had taught during
the development of Balloon Fight had directly helped Toshihiko to build Super Mario Bros.
That made Satoru happy.
Towards the end of work on Super Mario Bros, Satoru paid a visit to Nintendo’s office,
where he was presented with a pre-release copy of the game.
He took it back to HAL Laboratory, where nobody at the company got any work done for two weeks,
as they were all busy playing the game!
Immediately following the completion of Super Mario Bros, the Golden Triangle were needed
on other projects.
Most pressingly, another Famicom game, The Legend of Zelda, needed to be wrapped up.
And so, as the team was thrilled with the conclusion of Super Mario Bros, Shigeru Miyamoto
said, “Celebrate by all means, but only for about three hours.”
In spite of this heavy work load, the three developers were eager to continue working
together.
They felt less like professional game designers, and more like a kind of hobby group that get
together and share their enthusiasm for games development.
Over the next few decades of work, the trio would find themselves taking on increasingly
senior roles within the company.
Sometimes, they’d work together, and sometimes they’d tackle separate projects, but all
the while, they’d be communicating and sharing ideas.
Even to this day, whenever possible, the trio sit together at lunch, sharing stories about
what they’ve been doing on weekends, and laughing and joking.
Satoru once described the Golden Triangle as kind of like a comedy trio.
Wherever they go, things get a lot more interesting, and a lot funnier.
And so, when Nintendo started making brand new 2D Mario platformers for the New Super
Mario Bros series, the old guard couldn’t help but get sucked into development.
Each would offer help in their own way.
Takashi would stick his head around the door in meetings and pipe up with suggestions.
Toshihiko would offer guidance to developers who needed extra help.
Meanwhile, Shigeru stood behind developers, watching gameplay footage, and ordering them
to make big and small changes to reflect his personal preferences.
Nobody asked him to do this, and he wasn’t part of the main development team; he simply
loves getting involved in game design whenever possible.
The moral of the story is that good friends help you to be better.
Surround yourself with people that help you to improve.
People that make you happy, and who encourage you in working to meet your goals.
Having friends to rely on can make the process of growing and learning a lot easier.
You’ll find it less stressful to bear through challenging times, and their insight can help
you to develop solutions to difficult problems.
But, aside from anything else, they help you to enjoy life, and that’s what matters most.
But the story of the Golden Triangle doesn’t end here.
One day, Nintendo ran into a problem.
The company wanted to develop two separate 2D Mario platformers at the same time.
But while the company had grown and there were a lot of very talented developers that
were available to work on the projects, they didn’t have any experience making these
kinds of games.
And so, two members of the Golden Triangle reunited.
Their mission: to train younger Nintendo staff in the art of making a Super Mario Bros game.
Next week, we’ll tell the story of The Mario Cram School, and how Takashi Tezuka and Toshihiko
Nagako taught a new generation all their gaming design secrets.
To be continued…