Besides being a beautiful website, I was rather touched by their call to action:<p>"Seeking stability only clouds your soul. Fear of failing only kills the seeds of innovation. We must create a more exciting future where people feel free to dream and leap into a world of possibilities. We must create a freer future where people are eager to truly live."<p>It's hard not to love Nintendo.<p>Also TLDR for those that didn't scroll through the whole thing, this family wants to use their wealth to fund business ventures in Japan. For those unfamiliar, Japan has had a so-called "Great Stagnation" since the 90s. Population has declined, GDP growth is slow and puttering, and some are saying that Japan has lost the edge it had in the 80s.<p>This sounds like the Yamauchi family's attempt to bootstrap and create an ecosystem of ventures to reinvigorate entrepreneurship in Japan and their way of giving back.
For those interested, dev agency is Mount Inc. [0]<p>Some behinds the scenes production stuff on their Twitter feed. [1]<p>[0]: <a href="https://mount.jp/" rel="nofollow">https://mount.jp/</a><p>[1]: <a href="https://twitter.com/mount_inc/status/1381805222679379969" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/mount_inc/status/1381805222679379969</a>
"The Web is dead. Long live the Web!"<p>This website is so magical. It gives me a child-like feeling of true discovery.<p>The first website I ever visited was SGI.com. I saw it advertised in a computer magazine, but I didn't have access to the Internet. By chance, a few months later, I learned the central branch of my city library had <i>one</i> PC with dial-up. You had to reserve it. The waiting list was long. I still remember staring at the blank grey browser window, carefully pecking "www.sgi.com" into the location bar. Then... waiting, and waiting, and waiting(!) for all the graphics to load. SGI's homepage was full of these beautiful pre-rendered three-dimensional graphics. It was worth the wait!
Just saw this before bed. Geezus. Bringing the early 2000s web design experience vibes.<p>Website of the family of the founder of Nintendo. Of course it's like this. Ha
Attention: It nearly flipping fried my CPU.<p>But awesome site.<p>Tested On both Safari and Chrome on macOS. 100% CPU usage when scrolling.<p>Edit: On WOW, from the comments I decide to try it on my iPhone 11. <i>Ultra</i> Smooth Rendering with Music ( which wasn't even playing on my Mac ). And my phone isn't even warm after a minutes of playing around. Amazing<p>Which makes me wonder. Why?
From a frontend devs perspective this actually is pretty crazy. I was going through the markup for 5 minutes and could barely tell what is what and how stuff is rendered. Chapeau!
First click reminded me of Summer Wars[1] (Japanese: サマーウォーズ) immediately! The music video[2] nicely retains the opening effect.<p>[1]: <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_Wars" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_Wars</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cZuj-uTvdYc" rel="nofollow">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cZuj-uTvdYc</a>
I know this is not a particularly useful comment, but I love this so much. The attention to detail is incredible, the art is lovely, the song is so nice. I love the sentiment in the statement and philosophy. It reminds of katamary damacy. The more I look at it, the more impressed I am.<p>Re: the detail, occasionally, the little blocks will randomly run into each other. When they do, they roll /over/ each other!<p>Re: performance, I've got no problems running it in FF on ubuntu.
What is the song called? I checked the networking inspector, but it didn't show anything. It seems "engine.js" is making xhttp requests and building an audio buffer - but it's all obfuscated. This shit is stuck in my head now, and I need an offline version of it.
Not sure about anyone of you but in my case the experience is terrible. Initial load 3.7 secs, then additional assets were downloaded +7secs. And this all just to show the button "Enter" which was unresponsive. After waiting for a couple more seconds background appeared. At this point I've spent 10 seconds on a site.<p>FYI I'm on 16'mbp so there is more than enough processing power. Maybe it is because of 11MB the website needs for the button to start working (delivered via 114 requests), but on the other hand my network throughput is around 100mb.<p>edit:
Network monitor says that each of png tiles (~300B) took 11sec on average to receive.<p>edit:
Still can reproduce this but the loading time fluctuates 3-11secs. I'm on FFv87. Maybe I'm too far from the CDN server.
As I face into another day of tedious Jira wrangling, this really lifted my spirits!
The music really makes the difference.
I was also struck by the quote regarding stability and innovation.
FWIW, very little CPU overhead on ThinkPad X280 with FireFox.
Love it. If i ever get enough wealth to setup a family office I would want it to be as crazy/fun as this. Kudos for having the ability to toggle from crazy to normal views also.
For those who don't know, a Family Office is "a privately held company that handles investment management and wealth management for a wealthy family, generally one with over $100 million in investable assets" (as per Wikipedia) relating to the Nintendo Founder family
Genuinely curious: Can someone provide some insight into how this was built.<p><a href="https://mobile.twitter.com/mount_inc/status/1381805222679379969" rel="nofollow">https://mobile.twitter.com/mount_inc/status/1381805222679379...</a><p>There is this link from the development agency. However its a bit hard to understand. It feels like they built their own rendering engine and then coded the animation on top of it...
Within a few seconds of loading, Safari gave me a warning: “This webpage is using significant memory. Closing it may improve the responsiveness of your Mac.”<p>Cool site still.
On their current trajectory, they will be an extinct race in about 50 years. Instead of being insular they should look outwards. Open up migration and stop being racial and maybe that will introduce some fresh ideas. You loose some but win in the long term.
I got into programming for the fun of it, and it's become easier and easier to forget that as it's become more of a job. This was a much needed reminder! No doubt this must have been a joy to build
Like most people here it's all just opinion.<p>I'm happy someone is pushing for more innovation in Japan but ... there's huge issues<p>(1) Japanese people generally only speak Japanese. That tends to limit their reach to Japan only. Sure there are exceptions, I'm just saying it adds a hurdle. It also adds a hurdle to importing people.<p>(2) Japanese culture doesn't encourage sticking out. There's a reason one of the most famous Japanese sayings is "the nail that sticks out gets hammered down". Nearly ever part of Japanese is set against innovation. From the culture of "life time employment", the culture of "cram in high school for a college, party at college, arrive at job making $25k a year because you have no skills but company will train you, hired based on which school you went to". There's the "seniority issues where you're required to defer to anyone hired before you" (apparently that's even worse in Korea to the point my Korean friends say you can't ever truly be best friends with someone a few years old than you because you're required to treat them as your elder, not your peer). There's whole business legal issues where for all kinds of business transactions you're require to go to the local business administration office and have them print out officially stamped forms which you then submit it contracts etc..., You can add in the financial system here is not friendly to new ventures. I don't know where to point to how risk adverse things are here but I can point concretely for you to look at interest rates on savings accounts, certificate of deposit, etc to see it's vastly different than the USA.<p>(3) Japanese culture for various reasons still produces a much smaller number of career women. If you thought the representation of women in STEM (or pick your career) was low in some country in the west, it's 2-3-4-5x worse here. I'm not going to blame any particular thing but it is the current culture all around. The point is their missing a large pool of talent<p>(4) There's not much talent here. I don't mean that Japanese people are not talented, I mean rather it's impossible to hire talent. I have friends running companies and they can't find anyone even in Tokyo Metro (34 million people) and Osaka Metro (19 million people). Some of that is cultural, people don't switch jobs. Some of it is truly lack of talent (see education issue above), some of it is low salaries. Example: Top pay at Sony Japan for a software engineer is ~$70k. Most places pay much less. A few cash rich companies might pay more, (Cyber Agent, Mercari, are rumored to pay above $100k).<p>(5) If software engineers are the leaders of most innovation now, maybe they aren't, but if they are, Japan's attitude about them is they must be 21 to 35 and they are just replaceable cogs. After 35 they must be managers or else they move into some other field.<p>(6) Overtime is ridiculous
It's nice and creative, and that's what matters, people remember these web experience, that's why Flash was popular back then, it was all about impact, when today, the great majority of websites slap the exact same (bootstrap/material) layout, the same typography, down to the same "allegra" illustrations and nobody remember any of these...<p>But it's definitely not the craziest website I've ever seen.
Clicking "Enter" doesn't work for me on MacOS on Firefox. Google Tag Manager is the only script that is being blocked though disabling (loaded more google stuff and) it didn't help.