The email sent will contain a link to this article, the article title, and an article excerpt (if available). For security reasons, your IP address will also be included in the sent email.
As usual, I will call wednesday day 1 of the Game Developer's Conference even though it has other types of sessions on monday and tuesday.
Iwata, President of Nintendo
First up was the keynote speech by Satoru Iwata, president of Nintendo. I still remember his last speech years ago from before the Wii came out. He outlined Nintendo's entire strategy on DS and Wii, and the general reaction from the crowd was "nice wishful thinking there, bud." I was impressed with his plan and thought it was good, but I had doubts whether it would actually work. Nintendo went on to smash everyone with the DS and Wii, and his plan came true with even more wild success than he hinted at. My point is that we should listen to Mr. Iwata. I got there early specifically to make sure there was no chance I would miss his talk, even though waking up early is highly traumatic to me.
I'll first tell you the various odds and ends he covered later in his talk, before focusing on his main point. The odds and ends: 1) the Wii system software has been updated to version 4.0 (now supports downloading games to SD cards and loading SD cards of any size, not just 2 GB), 2) there is a pretty cool Wario Ware DSi game that uses the camera and after each session you can see (and trade with friends!) a video of how stupid you looked playing the game, and 3) a Japanese pop music star contacted Nintendo because he wanted to make a rhythm game, made it, and it comes out in the US in about 7 days. It's called Rhythm Heaven and we all got copies of the game for attending. The last time we all got copies of a game was when Mr. Iwata gave us Brain Age just before it came out, years ago.
But most of Iwata's lecture was about Shigeru Miyamoto. Iwata told us about how Iwata himself used to work at HAL Laboratories and how difficult it was being a developer. He says that today, people think that only Nintendo can be successful in selling a game on the Wii, but that he thinks that is not true. He understands why we'd think that because when he was at HAL, he thought the same thing. It seemed that Nintendo just had more money and that is why they could make a more polished game.
Meanwhile at HAL, he found himself in what he called the Death Spiral.
Return to Article
