hen you get an invite to meet with Shigeru Miyamoto, it’s hard to say no. Less than 24 hours after getting word from Nintendo that he was going to be talking with a handful of gaming press, I found myself on a plane headed to New York. After soaking up a little sun in Central Park for a while, I found myself in a board room face to face with Nintendo’s not-so-secret weapon. The man behind Donkey Kong, Mario, Zelda, Pikman and just about everything else in the big N’s arsenal was giving a special briefing on Wii Fit. While I’d already messed around with the Japanese import and had plenty of hands-on (feet on?) time with it, hearing about the title from Miyamoto himself was a real treat.
The first part of the briefing consisted of Miyomoto talking about the development process behind Wii Fit, starting with his personal interest in keeping track of his weight. After plotting it on homemade graphs, he thought it could be the basis of an interesting game. Once he convinced the rest of the development team that it could actually work, development began on a scale peripheral, which later became the Wii Fit Balance Board. Initially, it was designed to only measure weight, then someone was inspired by the way sumo wrestlers, too large for a single household scale, weight themselves by balancing between two scales. That idea evolved further, eventually becoming the four-point balance sensor/scale hybrid that’s the centerpiece of Wii Fit. A longer, detailed version of this and much more can be found in a comprehensive Iwata Asks feature. If you’re interested in game and peripheral development, it’s a fascinating read—regardless of what you might think of Wii Fit.
After the talk, Miyamoto opened the floor for questions. During the hour-long Q&A, we learned some interesting things about Wii Fit as well as the future of the Balance Board peripheral. For one, Wii Fit was designed in such a way that other games could eventually take advantage of the data it acquires. Imagine playing a third-party sports game for a while, then having that activity measured and plugged into your Wii Fit account. Interesting. And while he wouldn’t elaborate, he didn’t rule out the possibility that Wii Fit could eventually see online functionality during its lifespan.
Here’s the complete Q&A, with questions from representatives from Newsweek, 1up, GamePro, EGM, GameDaily and, of course, Game Informer.
Q: You mentioned that you ran in Central Park. I’m curious, do you feel there are any differences between running in Central Park and running in Kyoto? And of the cities in which you have run, what’s your favorite city to run in?
Shigeru Miyamoto: I would say that jogging in Central Park—for people who jog around the world—is possibly a life’s dream come true. And I like jogging. Last year, I was able to jog on the beach in Santa Monica, which, again, is an idealistic scenario for the scenery you’re able to explore. And of course, jogging this morning in Central Park, the thing that I find that’s really nice about it was that there are a lot of beautiful gardens; there’s an English garden. There’s a lot to see in the park. So actually, I say I went jogging this morning, but I found that I would jog for a bit and then walk for a bit and then jog for a bit and then walk some more and take in the scenery and jog some more. But it was quite fun.
And of course, while in the park I do see some trees and plants that I do see in Japan, as well—the cherry blossoms are particularly nice this time of year. I also came across a number of very large trees which I’d never seen before that I found to be very interesting, and I managed to catch site of a cardinal, a red bird that we never see in Kyoto. So that was really nice.
I don’t think I would ever get tired of running in Central Park, so I think that might be my favorite. I ran it yesterday and today as well.
Q: Do you see Wii Fit as the beginning of more exercise-themed games for the Wii or some of the other platforms?
Miyamoto: I think that maybe what we’ll see is maybe fitness-DVD style activities having interactive elements added to them and seeing that coming out on game systems. I can see possibilities there. Of course, I think the game industry has a tendency of, once they see something that succeeds, there’s a tendency to replicate that success and release similar types of software. My hope would be that, rather than trying to replicate something like Wii Fit, that people would instead continue try to come up with ideas that are different and unique.
Of course, we’ve been also releasing games like Wii Sports, and I think Wii Fit is most similar to that, but what I want to say is that while our intent is not to try to monopolize that style of game, I think that our goal is that, while obviously there are people who are fans of a particular sport and want a very in-depth interactive experience for that sport, there’s also a much wider audience that kind of likes sports in general, and they want something in a sports game that they can pick up and play that has a number of different sports in it. But at the same time, if everybody starts releasing games that are packs of small, compact sports games, then of course, in the end, the consumer is ultimately going to be confused and not really know which sports game should I buy. Similarly, with something like Wii Fit, the way that we designed that game, and the way we designed Wii Sports, was really based around the idea of trying to provide the consumer with something that is easily accessible for them and gets them the variety in experience that they’re looking at. And with Wii Fit, it’s all about trying to make that experience intuitive and easy, which is why we included in Wii Fit a Wii Fit channel that’s downloaded from the disk to the Wii menu, which allows you to very quickly go in—and not even having the game disk inserted—do your body check on a daily basis and have that saved to your save data.
While I say we’re not trying to monopolize that style of game, I would hope that other game developers wouldn’t necessarily try to replicate the experiences that we’re doing but instead take into account the best experiences that they can bring to the consumer in a way that meets the consumer’s needs and then provides an intuitive and easy to pick up experience rather than trying to necessarily replicate the success that we’ve seen; that they try to look at it from the same perspective but then try to create ideas to that.
Q: Have you had a chance to play around with some of the older fitness-based games? Sony had an EyeToy game, Kinetic, and then there was also an old Xbox game called Yourself!Fitness. I’m just wondering if you’ve had a chance to play with those, and secondly, why this game will have a wider appeal than those games?
Miyamoto: I have to apologize, but I haven’t played those games. As far as maybe why Wii Fit might have a broader appeal, I can’t really say, but one thing is that when we developed Wii Fit, we put all of our effort into making this the best product that it could be. We used one of our best development teams, and we took the development of it very seriously and took a lot of different interfaces into consideration and really had a very strong focus on how we can make this product appeal to a wider audience.
It’s hard for me to say, because I haven’t necessarily played some of those other games, but whether it’s the games you mentioned or a yoga game or something, the impression that I’ve gotten from some of those games that have come out in the past is that people tried to make them because, “Oh, maybe we can make a fitness game and it might do well,” but they didn’t necessarily approach it with the same level of earnestness and dedication that I feel that we have with Wii Fit.
I guess another way to say that is if, say yoga becomes very popular suddenly, then someone might say, “Hey, yoga’s popular. Let’s make a yoga game,” or if fitness becomes popular they might say, “Fitness is pretty popular right now, let’s see if we can make a fitness game and capitalize on that.” Whereas, our approach with Wii Fit was, “We want to create this experience—what can we do with this experience that can’t be done anywhere else?” And that was the approach that we took.
Q: On a similar note, I was wondering if you were influenced at all by other games that focus exclusively on the lower half of the body, like Dance Dance Revolution or even the old Power Pad games for the NES?
Miyamoto: As I explained about the development process just a minute ago, because we focused first on a device that was based on weighing yourself and then in the development process came to the idea of using your body to move and control the game, we didn’t really consciously think about the mats of previous games that use mats like that. I guess on the one hand, you might say that there’s some common inspiration between those types of games, because one of the other things that we wanted to do with Wii Fit was to create a game that looks fun to play to people who are watching other people play. So when you see somebody standing on the board, we wanted it to look like something that was fun. So in that sense, you say that’s an element that’s common in some of the other mat games. But really, we didn’t start off with the idea of, “We want to make a peripheral,” and came to the idea of, “Let’s make a game where we could weigh ourselves.” We started out on the other end. We said, “Let’s make a game where you can weigh yourself,” and then the peripheral came for that game and eventually evolved into the device that we see today.