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Shinya Takahashi, General Manager of Nintendo EPD, recently sat down for an interview with The Guardian, talking about how Nintendo has an advantage as an integrated software and hardware group, and their recruiting process.
According to Takahashi, the advantage of software and hardware integration is that both sides of the company can work together to decide what to aim for. He elaborates,
“We have the software team and the hardware team working very closely together. From the hardware perspective, they will sometimes come to the software group and say, ‘We have this particular chipset that we’re thinking about using in our next system, can you take advantage of this?’ But sometimes, the software team goes to hardware team and says, ‘We’re working with this theme, can you look into the technical possibilities, and see if you can come up with hardware features to accommodate it?”
Regarding how Nintendo recruits people, Takahashi explained that the recruiting process in Japan is different from Western companies, where they will hire people right out of college. They aim to employ graduates who really understand their achievements over the college years, like a determined artist who was able to focus on a large-scale idea, or someone who worked on a single movie from the beginning to the end of the course. It shows a mix of determination and knowledge that is precisely what Nintendo wants to see in their employees.
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