Satoru Iwata - Heart of a Gamer

[Music] please welcome to the stage director of the game developers conference Jamil [Music] [Applause] Madina good morning many of you will have a lot in common with our next speaker as he started out as a game developer himself if you've played any of the Kirby Earthbound or Smash Brothers games you've already met his inner self yet his vision of the future propelled him up the chain of command Landing him at the highest level of the video game industry we are also particularly appreciative that he will be he will be delivering his keynote in English and with a sore throat please join me in welcoming the top man at Nintendo worldwide president satoru iata

[Applause] [Music] thank you very much J all my business card I am a corporate president in my mind I am a game developer but in my heart I am a [Applause] gamer today I'd like to speak to you from my heart about our jobs and about our industry I remember the first video game I ever played it was pong and I loved it by the time I was in high school I

was the first person in my class to buy an Ali huret p pocket calculator I think I was one of the original eari adapters but where most people use their calculators for higher mathematics I used mine to program video games my first creation was a baseball game I don't think anyone can say it has bad Graphics because it has no Graphics game play was represented by only by numbers but when I saw my friends playing that game and having fun it made me feel proud

to me this was a source of energy and passion at that passion for games began to Blossom I think my life course was set in 1978 I entered the Tokyo Institute of Technology I would have loved to study video game programming but no one was teaching it then so I went to classes on engineering and early computer science but after class when my friends went back to the their rooms to study I took off on my motorcycle for One retail store in Tokyo this was the first store to have the department entirely dedicated to

personal computers that was my hangout and I was not alone there were others there who also looked at those early computers and thought the same thing I did how could we play games on them we became from Friends formed a club and soon rented an apartment in the Akihabara District of Tokyo where we began designing our own games we walked until midnight or later every night and that group of friends is what became the company known today as H the name came from the computer in the movie 2001 Space odess how

we thought that name was very cool also this is what I looked like back [Applause] then thank you like all game creators I was extremely cool too don't you think [Applause] so I don't really remember how but I managed to keep up with my classwork and graduated from The Institute but when it came time to take a job I had the distinction of joining the smallest company any grad of any graduate in my class I left to become only the fifth full-time employee of H and and when I told my father this you

can imagine it was not the happiest moment in the history of my family people sometimes ask me what I did when I was hired at H well the answer is that I was a programmer and an engineer and a designer and I marketed our games I also ordered a lot of takeout food and I helped clean up and it was all great fun perhaps the biggest moment in the history of how came when we had the rumor that Nintendo has developing a machine capable of incredible new graphics the ficon or NES as it was called here here in the

states we knew that this machine was for us so we used every contact to we could to get a meeting with Nintendo sure that one of our idea would became an instant hit yes Nintendo did hire us but not to amaze the world with one of our projects instead they told us to fix one of their project a game that had seriously fallen behind schedule instead of creating a game we repaired a game and it eventually was released as NES pinball that experience taught us that even artist must know the business side

of game development after all if a game never comes to Market there is very little chance of it making any money working in those days was also instructive in another way because the graphics were so primitive by today's standards we asked ourselves how we could spur the players imaginations as a substitute for what we couldn't display on the screen think about this someday our games won't look any better what will we do then well our work was satisfactory enough that we formed a close association with Nintendo and as how invented a couple of part franchises we also learn other

lessons our first kabby game taught us the value of teamwork since not everyone can be a M moto we discover that idea can come from several team members building on each other to make something Superior to what one person could invent then we worked with the famous Japanese Creator shoi who was already an AIT gamer himself to develop his first idea for a game that series called mother in Japan and released here in America as Earthbound proved to us that ideas take on a special appeal when they become Interactive many years and many projects later I

went to work for Nintendo full time and then one day about 3 years ago Mr yachi appointed me to succeed him as company president of course this was a great honor but it was also a great challenge I knew this would require committing much more time and assume assuming much more responsibility but fortunately game developers are familiar with such things so I'd like to move on this morning and answer two question that I often asked now that I've had two decades of experience in the video game

World excuse me first over the last 20 years as a developer what things have changed and second what things have stayed the same one thing that has not changed and will not change is our nature uh as a form of entertainment like any other entertainment medium we must create an emotional response in order to succeed laughter fear Joy anger affection surprise and most of all pride of accomplishment in the end triggering these feelings from our players is a true Judgment of our work this is the bottom line measurement

of success secondly we must always weigh Challenge and reward how much work and frustration a player is willing to withstand depends on the personality and skill of the player core Gamers have a huge appetite for challenge casual gamers want less ulty at Nintendo we believe it it is our responsibility to make games for all skill levels and most definitely that includes people who are not playing our games now the third thing that has not changed is the importance of the idea of course it is valuable to device an extension or offshoot of a current

idea but it is invaluable to come up with a brand new idea of what a game can be I'm sure there are few of you out there in the audience today with such creativity and our industry needs you fourth this truth never changes software sells Hardware people buy game systems to play the game they love I agree with Steve Jobs the head of Apple when he said software is the user experience software is the driving technology not just of computers but of all consumer electronics finally what has not changed is the value of intellectual

property if it is true that software sells Hardware it is more true than ever that franchises sell software while our industry has made Heat games with names like Spider-Man and James Bond and NFL football I think we should be proud that our best games are those whose here and World We Invented [Applause] ourselves thank you so then on the other side of the coin what do I think of when I consider what has changed one word immediately comes to mind bigger especially here in the Western

Hemisphere the business is bigger the North American and European retail markets alone are now worth approximately $17 billion in the US game sales were up another 8% last year there are games in your living room your office on your PDA your cell phone and of course best of all on your Nintendo DS many in the media are shocked to learn that young men now spend more time playing game than watching TV I think those of us in this room could have told them that a long time ago of course the games themselves have become much bigger in several ways they are bigger in a te technical sense

occupying more digital space that in turn requires bigger teams bigger budgets and bigger challenges in meeting deadlines this also mean that big game companies are getting bigger by consuming smaller ones we know that in the Next Generation budgets for triple play console games will regularly move into eight digits and that's before any marketing money is spent only the biggest companies can afford such cost not surprisingly the success of our industry and the profit margin for Heat games has again drawn big interest from larger entertainment companies but we may not be

compatible their books movies and TV shows are exactly the same for every user but our games that players help write their own screen plays and their own endings now I don't think any of this is news bigger budget bigger staffs bigger companies it's there for all of us to see big is obvious on the other hand what's more prominent in my thinking these days is how our industry is getting smaller we are smaller in the amount of risk we are willing to accept we are also smaller in how we Define video games the list of genes seems fixed

Shooters Sports platform puzzles and so on when is the last time we invented a new genre but as importantly even Within These genres we have reduced the environment we use the racing tracks the sound trcks the bosses the heroes are starting to looking more and more alike consider Tiger golf and Mario Golf each a successful franchise but using two different looks for the same genre such variety is becoming harder and harder to find we are even getting smaller in how we Define progress making games look more photo realistic is not the only means of

improving the game [Applause] experience I know on this point I risk being misunderstood so remember I am a man who once programed the baseball game with no baseball players if anyone appreciate Graphics it's me me but my point is that this is just one pass to improve games we need to find other Improvement has more than one definition and finally I am most concerned with what we think as a gamer as we spend more time and money chasing exactly the same players who are leaving

behind are we creating games just for each other do you have friends and family members who do not play video games well why don't they and I would ask this how often have you challenged yourself to create a game that you might not play I think these questions form an important challenge for all of us excuse me so I have preached more than enough about the state of our industry you may be wondering how does Nintendo plan to respond let me answer a couple of things in a straightforward way first has Nintendo turned its back on

the hardcore gamer I don't believe so if we were not interested in core Gamers we would not have packed in Metroid Prime hunters for each of you when you went out and bought your Nintendo DS this is not just excellent game exper entertainment but also a signal that we want the DS to be for core Gamers too we would not have partnered with npace in order to take a new look at Shooters in the game Guist which is coming exclusively to Nintendo GameCube I it it will it will move your emotions and move your definition of this Jour and if we are not interested in cor gamers GameCube would not be the home to

the first big hit of 2005 here in America capcon Resident Evil 4 it's a sign that not only do we care about core Gamers but cor Gamers care about Nintendo and most of all we would not be finishing the most anticipated game in your industry this year a brand new Legend of [Applause] Zelda I wonder love I I would love to tell you all about it but actions speak louder than words we have chosen you to see the First new footage of Zelda since E 10 months ago so take a [Applause]

[Music] look yeah oh

w [Music] [Applause] [Applause] a new look is only one part of the Zelda story much more of the mystery will be revealed at E3 this latest Zelda Adventure will appeal to core Gamers and all Gamers just like every previous version the reason I believe is that it meets the standards which set for all software we

develop we call these standards the Four Eyes First is it truly Innovative something different from what has come before second is it intuitive does control of the game and the direction of game play seem natural third is it inviting do you want to spend time in this world and finally how does it measure up in terms of interface can the player connect in new ways certainly few games can score perfectly in each of these areas but at Nintendo this is how we measure ourselves and why we apply these standards to our software

projects there is also an obvious Hardware example Nintendo DS it was designed to demonstrate both Innovation and new forms of interface to be both intuitive and inviting so far people seems to have decided that it does all of that as of today we have shipped 4 million DS systems to Japan and North America in just 16 weeks since launch and those numbers do not include Europe where Nintendo DS begin selling tomorrow I know that you are all familiar with the novel aspect of DS gameplay Inc incorporating to the the two screens the touch screen and the

microphone what you may not have much knowledge of yet is Wireless gamepl we are now finishing up a game Mario Kart that will allow eight players to compete simultaneously yes Gamers already know that Mario Kart is fun but does the BS version make it even more fun well let's find out let me ask you this is there anyone out there who is celebrating a birthday today if so please stand up okay please come up here to the stage we have anybody celebrating a birthday today and in fact if your birthday if your bir

come see this gentleman in the blue shirt here in fact if your birthday is any day this week please stand up we got few more any day this we six of you to come up here and join me come on don't be sad [Applause] Bill Bill Tran from Nintendo of America is also going to join us and we will form a test group for wireless Mario Kart on Nintendo DS let's uh go ahead and spread out a little bit on stage so that uh if you guys aren't too happy with the results of the race you don't getting too big of a fight here okay on the screen above us you see will build card I hope trading mine right bill now if You' ever played Mario Kart game then you've got a pretty good idea

of what you're going to be doing here if you haven't for some strange and unexplicable reason uh I'll give you the control schemes you'll use the a button for your accelerator you'll steer with the plus control pad if for whatever reason you decide you need to step on the brakes which I don't know of anyone who ever does that in Mario Kart but that's the B button uh when you go into a curve you can use the R button to hop into your power slide and once you pick up an item you can use the L button to use the item okay let's start and remember mystery W is not your standard corporate suit here the guy used to he used to program games he certainly knows how to play them so don't pull any punches he's not fun to lose to now see I'm off to a good start here already except for the fact that I just missed my item and that I can't seem to get off the grass mrada which character are you I'm Mario you're

Mario I'm a good player everybody get Mario no I have been trying to beat him all week and I've had no success I don't know um use the a button this button it's to go fast steer with the uh plus control pad oh okay oh yeah think sure now you can see on my screen I've got a close-up map of my character so I can see what's going on in my immediate vicinity when I'm paying attention to that I can see if there's a red shell coming my way or I can press the x button to get a full screen view to see just how far behind I am from Mystery [Music] W take that peach now if you're really good at the power slide you can power your way through the turns here kind of like I'm

[Music] doing and now that we've got uh just over one lap to go I think I'm ready to make my move oh yeah there we go yeah unfortunate I'm very bad I'm finally going to beat this is great [Music] ouch oh who was that oh and all I get a banana [Music] jeez okay [Music] who uh somehow I don't think I'm going to pull this out well second play isn't too bad congratulations

[Applause] congratulations thank you very much everybody thank you thank you very much for joining us thank you very now unfortunately we're not going to be giving these to you today so if you can go ahead and leave your DS's and your Game Boy Advance or your your Mario Kart games with our friend in the blue shirt here that would be great yeah these days I spend so much of my time on meetings and interviews and traveling I sometimes forget how much fun have playing games I like that well this demonstration of wiress Mario Kart brings us up to the present moment this is a product that we we will bring to the market Market later this

year but I would like to spend the rest of my time today on what is perhaps the next logical question where does Nintendo go from here let me try to explain it first with an image in the universe of interactive entertainment there is a planet we call video games it is the one we know best but it is only one also in our universe are other planets which entertain but in different ways from current games it is this part of the universe we are anxious to explore so this idea creates the Dual passion of Nintendo on one hand we work every day

to make what we describe as video game better we want to give players what they want but at the same time we are intent on finding out what else we can use to entertain our second goal is to show players something new something they may not even know they want you already are familiar is a good example of this philosophy it's Pokemon at its core Pokemon is a wonderful role playing game but it is also much more players collect and trade Pokemon maybe the same way you once collected and traded bottle caps or BAS cars Pokemon expanded

RPGs to to places they hadn't gone before another example was our decision to put Picto chat into the DS it's not a game not a competition but a way for us to better understand how communicating wirelessly might also entertain and Pio chat as a wireless function also represents just the latest step in something much larger for Nintendo excuse me I want to announce today that following the groundbreaking work we have always always done in connecting players we will aggressively pursue

Wi-Fi connections beginning with Nintendo DS the original Game Boy connected two players with a cable then four players on Game Boy Advance we put four control ports on your consoles and then made our controllers wireless with Pokemon Fire and leaf green we packaged wireless adapters with the games that int introduced unfamiliar players over fairly large distances this is all part of a unify unifying philosophy that continues with Nintendo DS every aspect of Nintendo DS is designed to be friendly to all audiences therefore WiFi should be easy easy for everyone

too our goal is to make this process simple and sess users shouldn't give a thought Wi-Fi connections will feel like a local area network connections because they will use a common API we will let DS owners enjoy Wi-Fi without the difficulty of entering an s S ID or web key and maybe most importantly we will remove the most important consumer barrier because Nintendo's Wi-Fi connection will be free as I said thank you as I said simple and seamless so you may want to know is this infrastructure ready to go

almost what about development where are the deats by three you won't be asking that question well then what about the entertainment I can say today that you will be playing Wi-Fi games on DS this year what we are developing internally and externally with the number of people is very exciting to me at least one of these projects I believe will be groundbreaking and we look forward to your Wi-Fi games too let me give you one example of what we are working on internally we are developing Animal Crossing Wi-Fi we chose this property for a couple of reasons first first it is one of those noname games I mentioned a form of

entertainment that really doesn't have a winner or even a real conclusion and because of its unrestrained pace of action it avoids Wireless latency issues before you could take Animal Crossing to a different village now with Wi-Fi you can take it around the world so we feel that our form of free and easy virus play helps move our industry in a New Direction but we are making similar moves in software as well I want again to bring Buon and out to demonstrate two other things that come from a different part of the inter interactive entertainment universe but even before we show them I can tell

you they may seem unusual because they are something different this first one is the current passion of Mr mamoto and Bill [Applause] himself I'm sure uh by this point many of you have probably heard the name nintend dogs before some of you have probably seen screenshots of it and maybe even a few of you have seen the the video we showed at E3 last year or possibly even played it here on the show floor at the GDC what you haven't seen is the full version and what I'm going to try to show to you today is some of the unique microphone capabilities that we've implemented in this game that I think is going to get you very excited if my dog here Chopper is a good boy now obviously I've got one dog here in my house and I can pet him with the touchcreen and I can play with him and he is a very cute

puppy he is unfortunately very excited right now but what we can do is I can go and I can grab some items I can play with him in the house got a little tennis ball here that I can throw around for him he'll Chase it he'll play with it and maybe I can even get him to bring it back to me which is all well and good but so far this doesn't really show off anything so let's see if I can get him to really respond to me [Applause] Chopper now the best thing about the use of the microphone in nintend dogs is that this is not a standard set of terminology that you have to respond to that you have to memorize and work with the dog on you create your own terms you train this dog with the words you want to train it with so if you want to tell the dog to sit to make the dog sit you can be that if you want to tell the dog

to get down to make him sit it can be that or if you just want to say Boogeyman it can be that you teach the dog the terms you want so let's see if I can get Chopper to respond to some of the terms that I've taught him Chopper okay okay Chopper Sit Boy Sit Boy now unfortunately I have two dogs in real life and they don't listen to a thing I say either so I'm really not just a I'm just not a very good dog trainer I think and Chopper I think may be a little bit hungry so let me see what is uh I can come in here and check he is a little bit hungry so let me see if I can feed him some food and then get him to listen to me there we [Applause]

go now the game is going to feature over a dozen of the most popular breeds of dogs in the United States and each breed is going to have traits characteristic to that breed so you'll have dogs that are very good at being trained with voice commands you'll have dogs that will be very good at agility competitions and you'll have dogs that will be very good at things like frisbee competitions or flying discs I should say Chopper yeah Sit Boy Sit Boy uhoh now in this case some of the other features that the game does have is that you can also you can wash your dog you can take give him a little bath um you can also take them for walks around town we'll give him a little quick bath right here which is a lot of

fun he doesn't like me yanking his tail and then you just grab the shower handle and you wash them [Music] off okay come on let's get you clean here buddy there we go [Music] and there we go there we go now he's nice and sparkly quean you can also enjoy taking your dog for a walk around town where like all dogs he will mark his territory and leave little packages behind for people which it would be best if you could pick those up along the way Chopper Good Dog Chopper lie down lie

down good dog now what do I do here is Click there unfortunately I've been teaching Chopper a little too many commands this morning and he doesn't want to learn any more but what you would do is you would click right there tell your command into the the microphone and then the game would repeat your command and the dog would understand it so again you could teach him to play dead jump or in the case of Chopper you might want to teach him to sick balls and with that we're going to move on to the next [Applause] game and now M Miyamoto is very busy to finishing up this game in Japan as you see this product will expand our audience to players Who currently are not satisfied with

what we've been offering them I'm also going to ask Bill to show you one other software project we are calling electr Plankton that sounds different electr Plankton and it looks different too the idea here is that creativity should not just belong to the developer but to the player as well electroplankton is a game that really can only be described as an interactive musical composition experience which sounds kind of long but I don't really know what else to call it what it is is a software program like mrada says it's not really a game it's an experience and it's one that allows someone like me who has absolutely no musical capabilities whatsoever to do something that a lot of you probably do and that's create music and what you see me doing here is I'm just touching the

screen and by doing so I'm placing electr planktons on the screen and depending on where they're located they're making different noises and so I based on this I can compose a music compose a [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] song If I happen to have placed one in a spot I don't like I can simply grab it slide it somewhere else and change the note that it makes gradually in this mode as the electr planktons get larger you'll notice that the sounds they're making become slightly more symphonic and so as you're creating music the music that you're creating is interactive and changing it's really a fascinating experience but there's actually a lot more modes than just this one so I'm going to show you one more and I'm actually going to show you two more but this next one also takes advantage of the microphone

although it looks kind of strange so we have a nice drum beat going on here and you've got four fish swimming across the screen which probably looks kind of strange and doesn't make a lot of sense which is what we first thought when we got the game in the office until we started experimenting with it let me show you what it does I'm just going to tap one of these fish Electro Plankton Electro plank Electro [Applause] [Music] plank yeah [Applause]

[Applause] Nintendo who's your daddy who's your daddy Nintendo Nintendo now I I know I'm not a a great rapper but I'm know worse than Vanilla Ice so uh and then the next mode that I'm going to show you I think a lot of you are going to get a lot of fun out of uh and this is a little remix of the Super Mario theme song that I can FID around with and do whatever I want and we've got not just the Mario theme song but many others in here that you can change just by pressing the select button but I'm going to have give it a go and see how I do [Music]

this game is [Music] different this game is different [Music] it's designed to produce Harmony not adren adrenaline so far we are seeing different kinds of reactions to electropan some test players are confused they keep looking for their score or their next enemy but others are hypnotized there are people who simply refuse to turn the game off no no matter what your own reaction I think you can agree that this is

definitely not from the world we currently call video games thank you [Music] Bill thank you Bill so this is Nintendo's plan make our exist Game World much better better zeldas better Marios better Partnerships creating games like resident EV 4 but also exploring other worlds in interactive entertainment for us this is a passion this is a mission of Adventure and most importantly we want to you the creative heart for our entire industry to take that Journey with

us you may remember from E3 last year that we explained that DS had two meanings du screen and developer system and Nintendo Revolution is a developer system too with IBM we are creating revolutions core processor which we have called named Broadway because Broadway is the capital of live entertainment with the ATI we are developing the graphic chipset code named Hollywood because Hollywood is the capital of movie entertainment with Revolution we are determined to create the new capital of interactive entertainment now a couple of ECT specifics first contrary to much

speculation I can announce today that Revolution will be Backward [Applause] Compatible the best of the Nintendo GameCube Library will still be enjoyed by players years from now second as I said earlier we intended to incorporate Wireless technology in all we do therefore Nintendo Revolution will be Wi-Fi enabled built in to every [Applause] system thank you and third even though the game experience enjoyed by by players will be far different on Revolution developing foet will be

familiar it will not require a steep new learning Cur in this way just like Nintendo DS it's a place where the best idea not the biggest budget will [Applause] win and make no mistake we expect third party Publishers will be fully supportive of what we are we are doing from this point forward in support of all of our product lines Nintendo will be expanding our development reach some of these new games will come from larger internal teams some from the kinds of game Partnerships we've formed with third parties over recent years maybe someday we'll work on a game

together I'd like that if you don't mind I will finish today with memories from one more franchise in my Development Career Super Smash [Applause] Brothers at the time it was being developed for Nintendo GameCube I was already working fulltime for Nintendo but my heart told me I was still a developer so I assigned myself to how to rejoin the team finishing the game once again I was living on the Japanese developers diet of chips pizza and the rice balls and walking through the night from their offices it was possible to see Mount Fuji which

many say is most impressive if you are willing to wake up and see it at T but during this period just as years before with our K games we at H would see the sun shining on the mount mountain before we ever went to bed many say the sight of the first light on Mount Fuji inspires them but for me I hope I never see it again I also remember the first version of Smash Brother developed for Nintendo 64 the concept for the game as you know was to take the classic friendly n Nintendo franchise characters and have them as you say here in

America beat the heck out of each other the idea was not brand new there certainly have been a lot of fighting games and the characters looked pretty much the same way they always had so when we br the idea to Nintendo the concept did not sound hip or cool or revolutionary and because of all this there were people both inside and outside Nintendo who did not strongly favor our idea and this was the environment that our team worked under that attitude remained un Feel the Moment of Truth the moment when testers

began picking up the controllers and actually playing the game this is what happened people smiled then laughed then began shouting to each other that was the moment when everything for Smash Brother changed and I must tell tell you this was also one of the proudest moment in my Development Career yes the Smash Brothers Series has become a great wild worldwide success because it sold over 10 million copies worldwide thank you very much but the memory of that first moment when the testers began to play stays with me

always that is that moment that I call success we at how found a way to bring our idea to life our team believed deeply in the concept and we did not waver in our approach so in this important sense we at to we are just like everyone of you even if we come from different sides of the world speak different languages even if we eat too many chips or rice balls even if we have different tastes in games everyone of us here today is identical in the most important way each one of us has has the heart of the gamer thank you very much for your

attention [Applause] [Music] [Applause]