Nintendo’s UK boss looks forward to Christmas

By focusing on bringing in new demographics, does it concern you that you could alienate your core market and leave behind the people – the fans – who have made Nintendo so successful? Or is it easy to strike a balance between the two?

Definitely not! You definitely couldn’t say it’s easy, but then life wasn’t meant to be easy. It’s always a challenge, and especially when you’re a company like Nintendo, being innovative, and people look and say “why are you doing that?”

It’s because if you go back historically, videogames basically disappeared, and Nintendo basically resurrected it. We’re not saying that we’re in that position now of having to ressurect the industry, but to keep its vitality and keep it growing, we need to expand it. We still can’t and won’t neglect our existing fans, and I think that one of the things that’s been really positive news in terms of Revolution is the fact that it will be backwards compatible, going right back through the back catalogue to NES and SNES and everything else.

So that’s not neglecting our existing market. If you look at it, the existing market is so big – we’re going to take our chunk of that. Other people are going to take probably bigger chunks, smaller chunks, whatever. But there’s this whole area out there – I remember at the Games Summit recently someone was talking about the mobile phone market, and saying that there are 65 billion phones or whatever out there, and then you look at TV and DVD penetration. If you look at videogames, I think in the UK we’re in about 30 per cent of homes. If you look at DVDs, it’s around 95 per cent.

So if we’re at that 30 per cent, how do we break out to 50, 60 per cent of homes, and people, playing? We have to – we want to do that to try and grow the business.

So far most of your innovation seems to be focused on handheld gaming, whereas Sony has done a lot of work in reaching out to new markets with home console titles like Singstar and EyeToy. Are you planning more titles like that for the Cube, or are we waiting for Revolution to see home console innovation from Nintendo?

I think a lot of people forget where the innovation has really come from. When you first start looking at console gaming, you look at the start of various eras – even going back to N64, with GoldenEye and things like that, with the controller, with Mario and its 360 degree gameplay. All those sorts of things. The hand controllers being the way that they are… That came from Nintendo.

We’ve got voice control on Mario Party on GameCube. With Donkey Konga, we’ve got bongos. We’ve got dance mats as well, they’ve been around for a while. If you go back even further, to the NES or SNES days, they had online capabilities that let you use the stock exchange and things like that in Japan.

So a lot of things that people look at now and say, wow, look at the innovation – Nintendo has done, or has been doing, for quite some time. I think the same thing going forward, with Revolution that’s one of the things we’re talking about – in that as much as we’re seeking to innovate with DS, bringing new people in and making it easy for people to play, we’ll see that being part of Revolution as well.

Read the full interview [here].

By focusing on bringing in new demographics, does it concern you that you could alienate your core market and leave behind the people – the fans – who have made Nintendo so successful? Or is it easy to strike a balance between the two?

Definitely not! You definitely couldn’t say it’s easy, but then life wasn’t meant to be easy. It’s always a challenge, and especially when you’re a company like Nintendo, being innovative, and people look and say “why are you doing that?”

It’s because if you go back historically, videogames basically disappeared, and Nintendo basically resurrected it. We’re not saying that we’re in that position now of having to ressurect the industry, but to keep its vitality and keep it growing, we need to expand it. We still can’t and won’t neglect our existing fans, and I think that one of the things that’s been really positive news in terms of Revolution is the fact that it will be backwards compatible, going right back through the back catalogue to NES and SNES and everything else.

So that’s not neglecting our existing market. If you look at it, the existing market is so big – we’re going to take our chunk of that. Other people are going to take probably bigger chunks, smaller chunks, whatever. But there’s this whole area out there – I remember at the Games Summit recently someone was talking about the mobile phone market, and saying that there are 65 billion phones or whatever out there, and then you look at TV and DVD penetration. If you look at videogames, I think in the UK we’re in about 30 per cent of homes. If you look at DVDs, it’s around 95 per cent.

So if we’re at that 30 per cent, how do we break out to 50, 60 per cent of homes, and people, playing? We have to – we want to do that to try and grow the business.

So far most of your innovation seems to be focused on handheld gaming, whereas Sony has done a lot of work in reaching out to new markets with home console titles like Singstar and EyeToy. Are you planning more titles like that for the Cube, or are we waiting for Revolution to see home console innovation from Nintendo?

I think a lot of people forget where the innovation has really come from. When you first start looking at console gaming, you look at the start of various eras – even going back to N64, with GoldenEye and things like that, with the controller, with Mario and its 360 degree gameplay. All those sorts of things. The hand controllers being the way that they are… That came from Nintendo.

We’ve got voice control on Mario Party on GameCube. With Donkey Konga, we’ve got bongos. We’ve got dance mats as well, they’ve been around for a while. If you go back even further, to the NES or SNES days, they had online capabilities that let you use the stock exchange and things like that in Japan.

So a lot of things that people look at now and say, wow, look at the innovation – Nintendo has done, or has been doing, for quite some time. I think the same thing going forward, with Revolution that’s one of the things we’re talking about – in that as much as we’re seeking to innovate with DS, bringing new people in and making it easy for people to play, we’ll see that being part of Revolution as well.

Read the full interview [here].