Guillaume Broch, head and creative director of Sandfall Interactive, and Ben Fiquet, head of Lizardcube (Shinobi: Art of Vengeance), both unexpectedly admitted that they didn't play Nintendo games as children.
Broch said that he grew up with the Sega Mega Drive, and then switched to PlayStation, getting carried away with the Final Fantasy and Atelier series. Fiquet added that his first console was the Sega Master System, bought only because a friend had one. He didn't even know about other options then.
Such stories are typical for Europe in the 80s and 90s. In particular, Nintendo products were hardly sold in France: the company gave distribution to Bandai and virtually ignored the market. Sega eventually gained a foothold with the Master System and Mega Drive, and computers like Amiga and Atari ST remained key. Later, when Sega began to lose ground, leadership quickly passed to the first PlayStation. For a whole generation of European players, Nintendo was on the periphery.
Nevertheless, a storm broke out on social networks. Some fans, especially from North America, wrote: "How could you, as developers, not play Nintendo projects?" Others doubted their professionalism, pointing out that Expedition 33 was supposedly inspired by Nintendo games, even though its author is not familiar with them.
This criticism ignores the obvious: in different regions, gaming history developed in its own way. While NES and SNES were shaping culture in the US, in Europe, future developers often grew up on Sega and Sony. And successful projects can very well be born outside of Nintendo traditions.
