Nintendo president Satoru Iwata in his interview suite in Los Angeles
As the Wii continues its seemingly unstoppable march towards market dominance, and with the Tokyo Game Show just a few weeks away, we thought it appropriate to reach into our warehouse of as-yet-unpublished interviews for this conversation we had with Nintendo president Satoru Iwata during the July E3 Media and Business Summit in Los Angeles. During our interview, Iwata's slightly eager, schoolboyish persona was replaced by a more casually confident mien, displaying the quiet self-assurance of a man sitting on top of the world. We discussed the company's decision to focus on casual audiences with its press conference; why the Wii version of Zelda was a relative flop in his native Japan; and what it feels like to have the game industry now assume that Nintendo's initiatives will succeed rather than fail.
So the first question is what was the strategy behind the series of announcements at yesterday's press conference? Because it seemed that other than Wii Fit, Nintendo didn't introduce any new franchises or new intellectual property. So what was the thinking behind having Wii Fit as the only new IP introduced at the press conference?
This year is sort of a streamlined E3. We want to narrow down our focus a little bit. So we decided to mainly mention the franchise series that would be coming out this fall, mention several titles that players will be excited to hear about. And again, we just decided that, plus Wii Fit matched our expectations of what we wanted to do with the show. However, we are definitely working on new franchises and we just didn't choose to talk about them yesterday. We really wanted to see how people would react to Wii Fit and how they would, and well again, we wanted to see the reactions of the people to our selection, Wii Fit.
Now, if we didn't feel that we had gained a lot of popular momentum and with success that it's shown so far, we might have tried to get out a little more information and do an upcoming products, again, just to build some excitement, but since we do have that momentum right now, we chose not to do so. After all, if we show too much now, too early, when those products are actually ready to come out, they won't seem very fresh if we just re-announce them later on. You have probably noticed this trend too, but I believe that the patterns in the past, you were able to announce things much earlier and have this gradual buildup, but I think that there's a desensitification--that's not a word.
Desensitization.
Thank you--and people aren't as patient with that information, to the span over which you can feed them information. It gets shorter and shorter.
You've spoken publicly about the fact that Zelda Twilight Princess has not done as well in Japan as you had hoped, nor has it performed as well there as it has in North America. When you look back at the span of time from when Zelda Twilight Princess was first shown to when it finally shipped, was that part of your thought process about why you now want to compress the amount of time from when you first introduce a product, show a product publicly and release that that product to consumer?
Loading Menu