Miyamoto-san's Best Of Times, Worst Of Times News

With an arsenal of "evergreen" titles and an ability to sell virtually anything, it's fair to say Nintendo is doing pretty well at the present time despite continued global financial insecurities.  However it wasn't that long ago when their fortunes weren't so rosy, the GameCube was languishing in third place in a three horse console race, and wild rumours suggesting that Nintendo might pull off a 'SEGA' and ditch the hardware race began to circulate.

In a recent interview with Famitsu (translated by 1UP), Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto has spoken of the sadness that this period, most notably the GameCube era, instilled in him and the initiative it provided to shift Nintendo's philosophy.

"There was an era when Nintendo was going in the direction of doing the same things other companies did," claimed Miyamoto-san. "The more we competed with new companies entering the market, the more we started acting similar to them. But is being number one in that competition the same as being number one with the general public? That's the question we had.

Entertainment is something that you have to look at the world with a very wide eye as you create it. I always thought that, but there were a few years where I was unable to get off other people's trends. It was a dilemma in my mind."

Such claims can be witnessed in the GameCube controller.  Nintendo has brought evolution to every console controller since the days of the NES with the invention of the shoulder buttons and analogue stick, however the GameCube failed to offer anything that moved the boundaries beyond a bizarre configuration of buttons (we're still quite fond of it).

When speaking about the N64 and GameCube, Miyamoto-san explains:

"I was endlessly fascinated with 3D worlds, but what with all the issues I had to tinker with in terms of rendering and processing speed, it got to the point where I didn't know who was making the games any longer.

"This is a job where you have a plan and you polish it endlessly while getting help from others. If Nintendo's games fail to stand out as games that aren't made that way proliferate, then it shows that the creation process is for nothing, which made me very sad. That was especially obvious during the GameCube era; Nintendo titles were hardly even discussed by the [non-gaming] general public back then."

Could the fact that only the hardcore were interested in Nintendo titles have caused Miyamoto-san to be saddened?  Is this the reason why we now have Nintendogs, Brain Training and Wii Fit from the man who previously gave us Mario and Zelda?

It certainly seems that necessity breeds innovation, however, and so we can track Nintendo's voyage of newfound discovery with titles such as Wii Fit and Brain Training to the release of the Classic NES range on the GameBoy Advance.

"We thought about starting over from scratch and aiming for games that can be played by people who don't play games," Miyamoto-san recalls. "We did some research, and the result was the Classic NES series, which got the response we were hoping for. In the end we didn't want a new game system, but a product that would make the entire world go crazy. And so Yamauchi [former Nintendo president] said 'two screens.' That turned the development lab upside down!"

"Doing that would make the system larger and essentially double the price," Miyamoto said.

"And yet we thought that it'd be a new surprise for the general public, that it wouldn't be a bad way to attract the interest of a wide band of people. So we went through some trial-and-error work which ultimately connected to the touch pen, something I had wanted to have for a while. I didn't think two screens was enough to make the DS a success, but the touch pen is what puts it all together, both in terms of cost and design. That's what helps make it seem fascinating to people."