Iwata Asks Wii H8 U

Iwata Asks on Project Cliche is up. Unknown to the Nintendo executives, Malstrom decide to join the interview by bending the barriers of time and space.

Note that all the text below, while they won’t have quotations, will be speech from the person pictured above.

Pictured Above: Iwata

I’ve been looking back at my calendar right before this interview, and I noticed that it’s been just about three years since we started having meetings about this.

Pictured Above: Malstrom

Reader, my suspicions are correct. This would place the origin of the Wii H8 U as 2008, the year that shall forever go down as infamy. In 2008 was the end of the Revolution. 2008 was the year of Wii Music. 2008 was where the 3DS was conjured up. But let me be quiet so Iwata can say something else.

Nintendo released the Wii console, and now that it has been accepted in many people’s lives, what went through your mind Miyamoto-san? What are you envisioning in the road ahead?

What does it matter what Miyamoto envisions? He doesn’t buy the console. The question really is, “Where is the market going?”

So you wanted to further pursue what you wanted to do with Wii.

Pictured Above: Miyamoto

Yeah. I wanted to improve on what we challenged with Wii, in how we wanted to perfect it in making it a device that rightfully belongs in the living room.

But it is the opposite of the Wii. If you are playing Wii H8 U on the TV and someone comes in and wants to watch baseball, you have to surrender the TV. The mission of the Wii was to dominate over other competition including TV and movies. Now, Wii H8 U is surrendering to it.

But because people outside the company do not have an insight into our development process, when people see this for the first time in 2011 when this is revealed, they might think, “Oh, Nintendo is going to add a tablet to their console”. I think that’s how people may see it.

But when we were first talking about this, tablet devices weren’t very common. It’s very similar with the Nintendo 3DS system, we release something after much internal debate and development, and that release timing happens to be when something like that is extremely popular. I feel like that has been our trend lately.

Iwata is declaring he and his employees as geniuses here. Note that he thinks 3d output is ‘extremely popular’. It either shows how out of sync he is with the market or how 3d is a longterm plan which Iwata expects to be everywhere in a few years.

Up until now, there was an appliance called the television that was always in the center of the living room, and video games always needed to use that setup in order for it to be played. (Genyo) Takeda-san³ often puts it as if it’s a parasite to the TV! (laughs)

Iwata talks as if televisions are now obsolete relics of the past. I guarantee you that the definition of home console gaming will be connecting a console to a TV for, at least, the next twenty years. How do I know this? Because the market wants it this way. And the market defines the future of video games, not Miyamoto or Iwata.

Yeah, so we started from the notion of “It would be nice if there was a small monitor of sorts other than the TV, where we could always see the status of the Wii console.”

Why not use your handheld device for that? You guys never did sync the DS to the Wii.

When we were making the Wii Remote controller, we talked greatly about how we need to make it so people who had never played video games could use it without feeling overwhelmed by it. We thought that it shouldn’t have that many buttons and control sticks, and thus the Wii Remote became something very simple in form.

On the other hand, when we were making this new controller, we heard from quite a few people who had seen what we had done with the Wii Remote, wondering why are we putting buttons and control sticks on it, and that it should be much simpler.

But Miyamoto-san, I remember you strongly opposing those comments saying, “what are you thinking!” I remember that moment clearly. Can I ask you to talk about what you think about people saying things like “I wish the A and B Buttons would disappear”, and “you don’t really need the control stick”.

Um, sure! (laughs) Well, I do proclaim rather boldly and tell people to not be afraid of doing things and to challenge new things on a daily basis. On the contrary, I’m rather conservative.

Bold, but cautious, I have to be. Not one of our customers is the same, so I think about it from the point of view of someone who has dealt with games for years, and at the same time I also think about how it will appear to people who have never played games. Back when we made the Wii Remote, our core design philosophy was how to lessen the number of buttons without losing past gameplay standards. Even if it was just one button that we were talking about taking out, I think I was the one who twisted my head over it the most.

So to those people who said things like how we should leave more buttons on it, I think “I completely understand. But that is exactly why we need to do it this way. There can be a new gameplay standard ahead of this.” That’s how we made the Wii Remote. With the new controller this time, it has a touchscreen here, and you can see information on it at anytime that won’t appear on the TV. So, on many levels, it’s a tool that makes things easier to understand. So by taking advantage of it, we can think about designing bold, brand new games. On the other hand, as we had to think about the resulting size of the new controller, I came to think that rather than focusing on efforts just trying to make it slimmer, we should focus more on designing it so that the potentials for us to be able to make a variety of new things can be further expanded. On the flipside, if it were all just buttons, it would have become a device that people would be overwhelmed with.

As my dad used to say, this is the biggest pile of horse hockey this side of the Rio Grande. Note how inarticulate and incoherent that rambling response is?

People liked the Wii because they liked motion controls, not because it was ‘accessible’. Nintendo no longer likes motion controls because players in motion would destroy any future for a ‘no glasses’ 3d output future (which Iwata has declared the successor to Wii h8 U will be).

What a bunch of wimps. Why not just state you want gaming to be your way? Lose this ‘appeal to the masses’ because it is clear that is not the objective of this console.

In a way, it’s a classic controller with a screen.

I think so.

And there you go.

And those who don’t want it (buttons and Circle Pads), do not need to use it.

They also don’t have to buy your console. They could just keep playing Wii.

When I think if a certain idea is good or not, I always think you can tell when that idea is presented, whether it can spur on many new ideas—in this case, in how many ways that it can be utilized. Just like with the Nintendo DS system, when you told us about the idea of making one of the screens a touchscreen, many ideas flowed from there about new possibilities. This time it’s very similar, by it taking on this structure, you’re now able to do much more with it.

‘Many ideas flowed…’ It sounds like I wandered into a poetry seminar. I thought the purpose of a game console was to entertain the market, not entertain developers so they can have ‘many ideas flow’. And, furthermore, I would like to say that based on the market projection of… [interrupted] Ladies, ladies, calm yourselves! I will be done with this interview soon enough.

There were things that weren’t suited to do on video games… Like when trying to enter text on Wii, even though we placed a lot of effort into it, I do not think we ever reached a point where we could proudly say that it was a stress-free experience. But this time, I feel that will change greatly.

If there are things that aren’t suited to do on video games, then perhaps a video game company shouldn’t try to do them!

No one will buy the Wii h8 U because it offers a ‘stress free experience’ of inserting text. Iwata may not know there is this thing that exists called… keyboards. It inserts text very well, and you could use it on the Wii. So the Wii could insert text far superior than the Wii h8 U ever could.

It’s more convenient to have things like a software keyboard at your fingertips. Like with a painting tool, it’s better to have two screens because the one where you draw, and another to show to someone are two different functions. With the Nintendo DS you can draw on it and show it to people but with the household TV, it’s too far to go up to it and draw on it, and then you don’t exactly want to show something very small that you drew on your handheld device, you would rather show it on a bigger screen. Even with just this situation, with this new controller, you can draw on the handheld real-time, and you are able to present it to everyone on the big screen. And with photos, they’re much more suited to display on a big screen when you want to show it to a lot of people, and it’s better to have something in your hands when you select the photos.

There is this thing called a laptop… Why on Earth would anyone put family pictures on their video game controller? And can we please talk about games? Aren’t you a gaming company?

It’s very similar with how in Karaoke, the information of the song that’s playing now is being displayed on the bigger screen, while someone’s choosing what to sing next in the palm of his or her hands.

That’s not the game I want to play… or anyone else for that matter. Try again.

Wii U can connect directly with the Wii Balance Board. From here on out, how do you want to change Wii Fit?

I don’t want to play that game either. We’ve already bought it twice. Are you trying to sell us the game again for a third time? Try another game.

The reason for that is there were restrictions that limited what you could do when making the simulation only with a single screen and a controller. You had no other choice but to make it that way. But now it can be more real, or “seem more realistic”. I think we’re able to add more realism in different ways without making the gameplay too difficult. Um… I laugh at myself about this but the game of golf. I don’t play a whole lot of golf at all, so when the golf ball gets stuck in rough terrain, I don’t really understand how tough that is! (laughs) But if I put this on the floor, it shows images of the ball buried under the grass, I get a sense of how tough it is in the rough.

Right, and another thing, is that you can look at the ball, then see what’s ahead of you, and look at the ball again and see what’s ahead again. You can look down, and away as you swing the club. Even with the Wii Remote and how it can be swung like a golf club, you never looked down. Until now, at least.

Realism? Why not just go outside and play the real thing? They are called games for a reason. Bah Golf. What else you got?

It changes things in baseball too. Until now, baseball games were more about how to control the professional athletes. But now you actually feel like you’re the softball player, and there’s this sense of immersion that you’re protecting the field.

As much as I hate to use a cat metaphor, but curiosity did kill the cat. Instead of exploring how we play games, why not explore why we play games. The Wii focused on why we played games, not how. It is why the console was called Wii (we) instead of Move or Motion. And forget baseball. What else do you got?

Actually, as I was making it I didn’t have a whole lot of doubts in my mind that the Wii Remote would still be used as it was. I feel like the Wii Remote has pretty much become its ideal form with the Wii Remote Plus.

No one cares how you feel. What matters is how I feel. I’m the one who is paying for all this! If anything, Wii h8 U shows that it is a stopgap to the console Nintendo really wants to make which is 3d output. The poor Wii user has bought the Wii, the Motion Plus, Wii Fit, Wii Zapper, the new Wii Remote, and now you want them to buy a whole new console so they can keep playing Wii Sports?

Right now I’m planning that people can still be able to use their Wii Remote controllers that they already have, which means this time you now have five controllers to play with.

You mean this new controller, and four Wii Remote Plus controllers for a total of five.

Right. Five controllers. And we have people play in many combinations.

That’s it, I’m out of here! With the Gamecube controllers, you could play eight player games on the Wii such as in Bomberman. Now, the number of game controllers is being reduced to five? Iwata Asks interviews began to suck once they turned into blatant marketing exercises.

Yeah, we are still trying to decide. I think if the licensee developers can come up with all kinds of new ideas as well, then our vision for the future of the Wii console will include numerous ways to play.

Does the consumer have any say in this? Apparently not. This is why when Wii h8 U goes to market, Nintendo is going to get an unpleasant surprise from consumers…

Well…we really debated about this, but when playing New Super Mario Bros. Wii¹⁰ on the Wii console with four people, people always talk about how there are Mario, Luigi, and two Toads, and they wonder why the two are Toads.

Right, it’s already been great fun playing with four players but sometimes you can’t tell who’s who.

You say things like, “who’s that Toad that just messed up?” (laughs) The characters have a distinct color on them but you start losing track in the heat of the moment.

But if we made it so that people can play with Princess Peach, you have to think about how to change her gameplay with her physical proportions, and if we went with Wario people would expect a different ability from him. But we’re not able to make all the player characters Toads either. That’s when someone brought up how great it would be if you could use Mii characters.

Hey jackasses, using a Mii instead involves no work from you while using Peach or Warior would. You guys don’t want to do any work like you did in the 80s. This is why you bleed customers left and right.

Although, I actually still debate by myself if it’s ok for a Mii character to be the main character of a Mario game! (laughs) But I made the decision thinking that our customers would want to play with their own Mii characters the most. I hope people play it thinking that they’re their own Mario, rather than their Mii.

Then why don’t you put the Mii as a character in your Super Mario 3DS game? But you won’t do it, will you, jackass? No one wants the Mii in Super Mario Brothers for the same reason Miis are out of place in 3d Mario. And why is there no emphasis on the content? That is why Super Mario Brothers became a phenomenon in the first place above and beyond Mario Brothers. Why are you intent on screwing up the last good franchise Nintendo has (2d Mario)?

Also, with side scrolling games like that, you can play with just the screen on the new controller without having to use the big screen when you’re playing by yourself. When someone else in your family wants to watch a show on TV while you’re playing, you can keep playing on the screen of the new controller, or you can show off your gameplay to the people in the room on the big screen. I think there is a wide range of options in what you can do.

Why not have the controller stream the TV while you keep playing Mario on the big TV? Why is Nintendo adopting a ‘video games are second class medium’ for the household?

On the other hand, how is it making something that’s completely new? Now that Wii U has been made, is it easier for you now to think of those things?

Hmm… Well… It’s just that I actually never worry about what to do when I think about new things. I’m the type that thinks there has to be new things to do.

By this line of thinking, if you fed Miyamoto a big bean burrito, you would get a different sort of game. Can this guy get over himself please? His feelings and emotions have nothing to do with the consumer experience.

Lately, it has become more difficult for game developers to see what they need to do next to make players happy. So far, I think developers have built in more content to make the games denser, and added quantity hoping that will please the players.

Huh? Where is this place, where Iwata is at, that games are like he just describes?

With Wii U, I also wanted to alleviate those restrictions as much as possible. I may be exaggerating by saying that with Wii U, we are posing a challenge against all creators. I want to challenge them by saying, “Wouldn’t your creation be better, while keeping all of its strong points with this new structure that we are offering?” and “Doesn’t this hold the key that could resolve a years-long dilemma?”

Now this is my idea of motion control! Hang on ladies! Whee!

Remember when Nintendo designed their consoles, such as the Wii, to be designed to be a solution to the consumers? Now it is as if the consoles are designed as a developer playtoy.

I think first and foremost it’s the new possibilities of multi-person play the new controller can offer, but I’d like to point out the relationship that video games have against standard television programming. With the way it is now, I think video games very commonly are responsible for creating situations that either takes the TV away from the parents when the child wants to play video games, or the children can’t play because the parents are watching a show on TV. But with the new controller, it has become clear that the two can now coexist.

The solution is to buy another TV. Miyamoto declared earlier in this interview of having multiple screens. Everyone has multiple TVs now. Even poor people.

The other things is, shortly after the Wii console was released, people in the gaming media and game enthusiasts started recognizing the Wii as a casual machine aimed toward families, and placed game consoles by Microsoft and Sony in a very similar light with each other, saying these are machines aimed towards those who passionately play games. It was a categorization between games that were aimed towards core, and casual. I’ve been having a sense of disagreement as I personally think the definition of a core gamer is much wider, namely, someone who has a much wider range of interests, someone who enthusiastically plays many types of games that challenges different creative directions.

See? Iwata knows the Core gamer doesn’t mean ‘Hardcore’ and Expanded Market doesn’t mean ‘dah casuals’.

On the other hand, I certainly do not think that Wii was able to cater to every gamer’s needs, so that’s also something I wanted to resolve.

Time to get in my deLorean. I’ll see you guys again in the year 2031. That would be twenty years from now.

The so-called ‘hardcore’ gaming on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 are actually just lobotomized PC games. Nintendo is not a PC game company. Nintendo is an arcade game company. This is why Nintendo has never been able to hold onto the lobotomized PC games. NES had some because it was the only console. Then, they went to Sega but Sega wasn’t a PC game company either. So then they went to Sony which was quite happy and adept at creating a lobotomized PC game machine that hooked up to the TV. Microsoft emulated this with the Xbox franchise.

Not having the lobotomized PC game players should not concern Nintendo. That market is unhealthy, and they will never get it anyway. Nintendo should focus on the arcade gaming side, of which Nintendo holds a monopoly being the last remaining console company originating from arcade gaming. That is where the Wii Sports and Super Mario Brothers 5 gamers are coming from.

The future and fortune of Nintendo depends on the arcade-side gamers, not on the PC game side players. The market taught this lesson to Nintendo before. With how the Wii has been managed, it appears the lesson was not learned, and the market will teach it to Nintendo again.