Quote:The Changing Face of Nintendo

A history of big words from the leaders who have shaped the way the company is today.

October 13, 2004 - Five years ago Nintendo was fresh from a hard fought war with Sony for the leadership position in the videogame industry. The rival's PlayStation console had entered the market before Nintendo 64 and taken an early lead that Nintendo could never quite catch. As work began on Project Dolphin, the codename for the successor to N64, Nintendo's leadership vowed to create a console that bettered many of the drawbacks of the cartridge-based system before it.

In the feature below, IGN takes a look at some of the boldest words from the men who have shaped Nintendo as it is today.

June, 2000
Q: What concerns you most about the Dolphin system?

Shigeru Miyamoto: That if it becomes too popular, we just cannot produce enough consoles [laughs].

June 2000; former Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi

[The Dolphin] will have a function to access the Internet. We are entering the market as a latecomer so the console will have to outperform Sony Corp.'s PlayStation 2. We are planning to introduce an Internet business next March or April. The first step will be online sales of a brand new type of Pokemon cards.

If we release software for the console similar to what Sony has for PlayStation 2, that would be a failure. More details will be announced on August 24, when we will also disclose details for the Game Boy Advance.
[Game Boy Advance's] performance will be similar to that of the Dreamcast.

August, 2000

Q: Nintendo always says that it doesn't care about what other companies do. Between the N64 and the GC, you only had four years. Does this mean that you already consider the PlayStation 2 a threat to your business?

Shigeru Miyamoto: Well, I don't feel the slightest threat from the PlayStation 2, and very frankly speaking, I am not too concerned about the existence of the PS2 at all, because we have created the GameCube hardware and will create the software that will become the requisite for everyone even though they already have the PS2. That is why I'm not too concerned about the PlayStation 2. The reason for the big announcement yesterday is because when we finished designing the N64, we already understood that we still needed to do something more, to make a new machine in the future. Now we have that new machine and we now realize that the functions of the GameCube are too good to not show people, and that is the reason that we made the announcement.

November 2000; Hiroshi Yamauchi



There are a lot of people who really do not know about games in the industry. Especially one big company in the USA thinks that it can use a lot of money to surround itself with software companies and accomplish what Nintendo has done. We don't think it will go that easily. It seems that they will be bringing their system out next year, and the results of how well they actually do will be known to us in the beginning of the following year.
November 2000

Q: What about Internet games?

Hiroshi Yamauchi: There are people who are in fact enjoying Internet games, and I'm sure they are enjoying them, but in the end, this is a fad thing. We don't think that this will turn into a multiplying game genre. There are reports that only a portion of the many Net games are actually selling, and that this is only a phase. We wouldn't bet our company's luck on such games.

February 2001; Hiroshi Yamauchi

The more amazing graphics and sound you put into a game, the longer it takes to finish. Not just a year, but now, more like a year and a half or two years. So then your development costs balloon, and when you finally put it out you have zero guarantee of it selling. That's what the game industry is today.

Because of that, I've been saying since last year that this industry will undergo a major shakeout between now and next year. The general public doesn't realize it yet, but most people in the industry know it's happening. I've just been saying that pretty soon, even the public will be forced to recognize what's going on.

June, 2001

Q: How would you say Nintendo's philosophy is different from Microsoft's?

Satoru Iwata: We have been in the entertainment business for a long time and we've learned a lot about when and how to invest our money. With Microsoft, they just haven't been in the entertainment business that long so they're not as familiar with and don't have the experience that we do.
What really showed me that they don't have the experience in the entertainment industry is that they started off by announcing the $500 million marketing amount. So that's what they're going to go with and that's a big number and of course it's great because it got them in the news. But our philosophy is that you don't start off with a number of what you're going to market something with. Rather, you look at the product, you look at the entertainment and what you're trying to package and what you want it to be. Then you think about the best way to convey that to the consumer. That's what entertainment is about and that's why we don't go in for those types of tactics. If you come up with a product that people don't want, it doesn't matter how much money you spend ? they're still not going to want it.

February 2002

Q: What are the keys, besides the obvious of making good games, for Nintendo to survive against Sony and Microsoft? And would Nintendo ever consider selling its games to one of these companies?

Satoru Iwata: Making good games is obviously important, but not enough to really win out in competition. I think really it is all about how different you can be from your competition and how you can set yourself apart. Because if you have really large companies that are well financed and competing on the same merits, what it really comes down to is that whoever has the most money will win. The most important thing for Nintendo is to make good games, but also to do what we want and define the difference that makes Nintendo what it is. This is something that we have been focusing on since last year and that's the direction that I think we will continue to go in
I think the media will often to refer to Sony and Microsoft as game industry giants and it's true in the sense of the sizes of the companies that they really are giants. But to me the question is, among the software makers and who is really selling software, who is the giant?

March 2002; Satoru Iwata



The thing about online is that people are talking about it and bringing it up as this kind of direction for gaming. But the fact of the matter is that many aren't really paying attention to a lot of the hurdles that have to be jumped before online becomes viable. One of the biggest ones, I think is, what's really going to be the penetration for broadband connections around the world? Where is that going to be in a few years? So people are talking about this and seem to focus only on online, but they fail to answer many of the questions surrounding it.

We have a lot of experience in online as I'm sure you're aware. We think very positively about the possibilities. We've done a lot of online experiments in the past. But until these hurdles are met and these problems are solved, I don't think that we should just jump into online because people think there's strength there right now. So we're certainly not in a position where we can say 'there will be an online Mario Kart in 2003.'

We're not negative toward the idea of going online. We're just practical.

February 2004; Hiroshi Yamauchi

Only people who do not know the videogame business would advocate the release of next-generation machines when people are not interested in cutting-edge technologies.

I have been saying this for some time, but customers are not interested in grand games with higher-quality graphics and sound and epic stories. Cutting-edge technologies and multiple functions do not necessarily lead to more fun. The excessively hardware-oriented way of thinking is totally wrong, but manufacturers are just throwing money at developing higher-performance hardware.

If we are unsuccessful with the Nintendo DS, we may not go bankrupt, but we will be crushed. The next two years will be a really crucial time for Nintendo.

October 2004; Nintendo of America's VP of sales and marketing Reginald Fils-Aime

Our focus is this: we will bring Revolution to the marketplace roughly at the same time as the competition. Certainly, our sight is on the number one player in the console space. We are driving our timetables based on what we believe Sony will do. We are driving our software lineup to maximize all the capabilities of Revolution. That's what we're looking to do. Not that I want to ignore the Xbox, but certainly we believe that a rush to a new system is a mistake. And frankly, there are a lot of examples as you look at the history of gameplay, that a rush to a new generation is not a good thing.

OB1 Wrote:We could be playing so many cool games right now...

And nobody else here has an XBL account!

DMiller Wrote:I had my free XBL account for a little while, but since Clone Wars/Tetris Worlds is my only online game it didn't really convince me to pay for the service.