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Wii

Iwata Interviews Wii Designers

by Steven Rodriguez - September 14, 2006, 8:07 pm EDT
Discuss in talkback! Source: http://wii.nintendo.com/iwata_asks_vol1_p1.html

Iwata turns the tables and talks to members of the team that created the Wii, inside and out.

The Wii section of Nintendo.com has posted a translated version of a very interesting interview with the troupe of NCL employees responsible for the design choices made for Wii. Interesting, in both the contents of the interview, and the interviewer himself.

Satoru Iwata, President of All Things Nintendo, sat down with four of Nintendo's finest, asking them about how the Wii design came about: Genyo Takeda, General Manager of Nintendo's R&D Division; Junji Takamoto, a Product Development Member of Nintendo R&D Group 3; Kenchiro Ashida, a designer within the R&D Design Group; and Kou Shiota, Product Developer for R&D 2.

To start the interview, Mr. Takeda explained that Wii development started right after the GameCube launched in late 2001. They started out following "mainstream technology Roadmaps" to see what kind of technology would be feasable to put in a console that is still years away from release. It wasn't until after a year of development that Nintendo realized giving people more powerful will just lead them to ask for even more powerful next time around, and more even powerful hardware after that. They felt that would eventually lead Nintendo nowhere.

Mr. Shiota was called on next to discuss the philosophy about the CPU. Instead of taking emerging semiconductor technologies to create bigger, more powerful chips, Nintendo decided instead to use it to make the chips smaller and more efficient:

Normally, when making new devices, companies compete with each other on the basis of “How much faster is the CPU, how much more memory is there, and how many more polygons can be displayed?" But Nintendo posed the question “How much can we decrease power consumption and maintain performance?"

On the same subject, Takeda chimes in with a comment comparing current game consoles to automobiles:

While some are trying to make faster cars, others are gathering public attention around the world with their hybrid engines. If automobiles can be used a metaphor, our industry has always been trying to compete over horsepower, even though not all cars are made to compete in F1 races.

To read the rest of the interview—and we very much recommend you do—head on over to Nintendo's site. More parts will be added as the weeks go on, and PGC will keep you updated on any new details that may come from them!

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