A look back on the Wii development team’s vision

President Satoru Iwata and the Wii team have been sharing with us their cool knowledge about the Wii development process (as well as their future plans). The latest installment of the series is dated October 5, and it looks like this time it’s Iwata in the hot seat. You can find the interview at Nintendo’s Japanese web site (click on the read link below). Trust us, it’s a long interview and the Babelfish and Google “translations” are awful:

The software compilation of Wii (‘Wii Sports’ is from the next time!) starts. As a chopstick resting during this serialization, it is a little long, is, but if you can read, you think. Please, we ask may.

So we’re waiting for a good translation (we’ll post it as soon as we get one). But until we get our hands on a good translation, we might as well do a recap. The Wii is coming out soon, and this has been a long series of interviews, so it’s time to review where the Wii started from.

Do you remember when Chris Kohler over at Game|Life posted a “recap” of a portion of the interview? That’s now old news to a lot of us (yup, many of us Wii-watchers first saw this September 8), but it’s worth discussing now. Each day that we come closer to launch (and each day that we come closer to finally deciding whether we will buy the Wii or not), we must never forget what the Wii was (and is) all about:

• In the beginning: Genyo Takeda explained to us that Nintendo started looking for something new after the GameCube came out.

• The problem: But the industry standard of making things bigger and more powerful will eventually lead to defeat because the customer will never be satisfied. “If you give people 1, they want 2, give them that and they want 3. Where does it stop? 5, 10, 100…?”

• The solution: Nintendo will create something different. But “something different” is vague and the engineers and designers got into arguments. Eventually they came up with a common vision.

• The vision: The Wii is a system that will be on 24 hours a day, and it’s a system where something new is happening each day.

• The discovery: They ran some simulations and found out that a GameCube-level platform can be redesigned so that it needs to consume only 1/3 to 1/4 of the power.

• The shift: With the Wii, the idea is “high performance, low power” instead of the industry standard of “high power, high performance” and instead of “low power, low performance.”

So our dear readers of this humble Wii blog, you’ve heard that the Wii is supposed to be a paradigm shift, a change in strategy, a new direction, a redefinition of gaming. How excited are you?

President Satoru Iwata and the Wii team have been sharing with us their cool knowledge about the Wii development process (as well as their future plans). The latest installment of the series is dated October 5, and it looks like this time it’s Iwata in the hot seat. You can find the interview at Nintendo’s Japanese web site (click on the read link below). Trust us, it’s a long interview and the Babelfish and Google “translations” are awful:

The software compilation of Wii (‘Wii Sports’ is from the next time!) starts. As a chopstick resting during this serialization, it is a little long, is, but if you can read, you think. Please, we ask may.

So we’re waiting for a good translation (we’ll post it as soon as we get one). But until we get our hands on a good translation, we might as well do a recap. The Wii is coming out soon, and this has been a long series of interviews, so it’s time to review where the Wii started from.

Do you remember when Chris Kohler over at Game|Life posted a “recap” of a portion of the interview? That’s now old news to a lot of us (yup, many of us Wii-watchers first saw this September 8), but it’s worth discussing now. Each day that we come closer to launch (and each day that we come closer to finally deciding whether we will buy the Wii or not), we must never forget what the Wii was (and is) all about:

• In the beginning: Genyo Takeda explained to us that Nintendo started looking for something new after the GameCube came out.

• The problem: But the industry standard of making things bigger and more powerful will eventually lead to defeat because the customer will never be satisfied. “If you give people 1, they want 2, give them that and they want 3. Where does it stop? 5, 10, 100…?”

• The solution: Nintendo will create something different. But “something different” is vague and the engineers and designers got into arguments. Eventually they came up with a common vision.

• The vision: The Wii is a system that will be on 24 hours a day, and it’s a system where something new is happening each day.

• The discovery: They ran some simulations and found out that a GameCube-level platform can be redesigned so that it needs to consume only 1/3 to 1/4 of the power.

• The shift: With the Wii, the idea is “high performance, low power” instead of the industry standard of “high power, high performance” and instead of “low power, low performance.”

So our dear readers of this humble Wii blog, you’ve heard that the Wii is supposed to be a paradigm shift, a change in strategy, a new direction, a redefinition of gaming. How excited are you?