The Nintendo Difference' by Satoru Iwata, E3 2001
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EnglishVoice Age
Young Adult (18-35)Accents
North American (General)Transcript
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Before coming to Nintendo, I worked as a game designer and then as an executive for the Japanese game development company called Hal. I learned a long time ago that in our business, it is almost impossible to design a game that has caught up with technology. This is because the technology you start with and the metal you work with will certainly become outdated by the time the game is finished. Among the first projects I designed was a game for the original Nintendo Entertainment system. The memory of that game cartridge was 64 kilobits. By the time Super Mario 64 arrived for the Nintendo 64 5 years ago, cartridge memory had been multiplied by 1000 times today. Some game graphics are already as realistic as television. There is not much more designers can do to impress players with only pictures. Here is another problem in our industry. Games look too much. The same Developers need to spend millions of dollars to create the best 3D graphics. And if they succeed in designing a hit game, they try to repeat that success, how they make a sequel and then another and then another and to pay back their big investments. Understandably, they market all of these Sequels for every major platform. And while that is happening, many competitors are copying the design of that one hit game. So we have identified three clear trends, too much focus on graphics over real entertainment, too many Sequels and Copycats for a few hit games and almost every game being available for every platform as a result. What lessons are we teaching our customers? Our players, we think about this often first, do not trust what you see for a game that looks good in an ad or in a store may not entertain you for very long. Second, there doesn't appear to be anything new. Everything looks familiar once you start to feel this way boredom sets in and finally, it may not even matter which machine you choose. They all play the same games. If that happens, console makers will find themselves in a commodity business like tvs, there will be no reason to choose one over another except for price. When you consider all of this, it is little wonder players become frustrated and that is dangerous for our industry because people do not need video games in order to survive. If they become bored, they will simply walk away here at Nintendo. We feel an obligation to fight these trends. How do we do that with what we call the Nintendo difference? The Nintendo difference has four legs or foundations. The first is innovation. We strive to always come up with something new, something no one has thought of before. In truth, some of our innovations have worked better than others, but we never stopped trying to innovate. Mr Yamauchi always tells me we should achieve something that brings fresh, surprise and joy. I like that. Second, we demand the highest quality from our games. Normally, Nintendo does not publish the most games but regularly, we are responsible for the most popular games today, Nintendo's 1st and 2nd party developers are among the brightest and most accomplished of any manufacturer in the world. Next, we create and expand upon the world's most popular video game characters and franchises. Mario Zelda, Donkey Kong and yes, Pokemon are entertainment names known around the world here. The Nintendo difference is obvious if you want these stars, you simply cannot have them unless you own a Nintendo machine. The final leg is heritage. This year we are introducing our fourth home console and every one of them has succeeded around the world. And of course, Game boy has out sold every other game machine ever. I believe we know more about what makes great games than anyone else. And this is why Nintendo succeeds. This is the Nintendo difference in our view. We are only an entertainment company, but we are working to become the best entertainment company anywhere.