E3 2003 | Miyamoto Interviews

Always effervescent about new products, always keen to express his fascinating views on the world of videogames, Miyamoto-san was in typically buoyant mood when we, along with select members of the gaming press, spoke with him at this year's E3 event in LA.
Over the course of a riveting hour, Miyamoto discussed Nintendo's new Pac-Man title, the company's focus on connectivity, stance on online gaming, life after Nintendo, and much, much more.

It's always a privilege to speak with the great man, and we're pleased to bring you the first part of our full transcript of the interview right now, crammed with enough gaming goodness to see you right through the weekend.

And when those first aching pangs of hunger return, be sure to check back for the second and final unmissable helping on Monday. Yummy.

Paul Davies
About the Pac-Man game, could you tell us what elements of the original game you most admire, that you felt would make a new version of Pac-Man a fun game?

Miyamoto:
Well the best part about games from a long time ago is that they were very simple, and it's these very simple elements to the gameplay that allowed large amounts of people to start playing these games. Back then when I was making games, we put a lot of focus into that and thought it was very important that people knew what it was that they needed to do, and that it was very clear what they had achieved and what it was they had failed to do.

So that was how we made games back then. But gradually over the years, very simple gameplay and very simple rules like that weren't enough to keep gamers satisfied, and so the games got more complicated. With the evolution in hardware and graphics the worlds got more complicated and the graphics got more incredible, and so in one sense the games got better, but at the same time they got less simplistic and so fewer people were really able to get in and play them.

With Pac-Man I think that, even with the same gameplay, it's still fun. To some people it might seem kind of boring because it's not as extravagant as a lot of games now, but there's still that core element of fun in it. By adding this new connectivity structure to the game you're able to take something that many people have played and are very familiar with - Pac-Man - and add new elements and new experiences to it that you've never been able to have before.

You're able to recapture some of that simplistic fun, and yet at the same time still provide freshness, such as not just playing Pac-Man but actually being the ghost and going after Pac-Man. At Nintendo, what we want to do with connectivity is show to other developers and our third-party partners that you don't have to just make games more complicated or more beautiful, you can actually take something that's as simple as a connectivity system and apply it to a game and have very simple gameplay that will be fun and very exciting for people.

So actually we focussed on trying not to change - we didn't look for what was good about the original Pac-Man and what was bad about it, we really focussed on trying not to change the origin
al concept but instead build in this connectivity idea to recapture some of the fun that people originally felt with that game. I guess the only change that we really did make was that the GameCube portion on the TV is 3D. There are a lot of other options we could consider with that idea, but those are all secret at this point!

Paul Davies
Metroid Prime has been one of the biggest hits for the GameCube so far. What can we expect from the second Metroid game?

Miyamoto:
What we did with Metroid Prime was gather individual developers and programmers from different areas and put them together into Retro Studios. This was their first project with all of these members working together, and while we were making Metroid Prime we didn't really know what the strengths and the weaknesses of the Retro team might be.

So Metroid Prime, as a first project, we thought went very well and based on that experience of their first project together we've learned where their real strengths lie and so... well I can't really say a whole lot about what's going to be in Metroid Prime 2, but because they have this experience behind them and they're going to be able to take advantage of their new-found strengths - I think you're going to find the game's going to be a lot cooler.

And the team of course after seeing everybody's reviews of Metroid Prime and winning multiple awards, they've really been excited by all that and they've got a lot of passion about it and they're excited to be working on the next one. But I do think that a multiplayer function that we were unable to include in the original is probably definitely within reach. [laughs] I don't know about any networking though!

Paul Davies
You said that one of Nintendo's challenges is to come up with a game as interesting and intriguing as Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, but without the violence. Can you elaborate or give us any specific ideas?

Miyamoto:
This year the focus of our show is connectivity and showing off the features and the possibilities that it provides - so I guess in that sense we haven't really shown titles that we hope to stand against Grand Theft Auto, something like that we might try to show next year or sometime after. This year we're showing titles that have their own unique gameplay with connectivity, something that can only be achieved with that title, and for that reason we think we'll gather user interest and appeal.

Actually I think Pikmin 2 this year is going to end up being one of our most fun games - we've actually removed the time limit, that was in the original Pikmin, so there's going to be a much greater degree of freedom within the game. Obviously Pikmin is a very different concept to Grand Theft Auto, but the underlying idea of being free to do what you want is there and I think that's going to be a very popular game for us.

Paul Davies
This new-found friend and colleague Hideo Kojima - have you had a discussion about what the essence of games is, what the user is doing with them? Hideo Kojima say that games are a commodity but what is getting used is parts of ourselves, so I wonder how he looks at himself - is he an artist, or a producer, or a commodity?

Miyamoto:
I think that, apart from how other people may view it, I personally see what I make as being a product for sale, and not so much as a work of art. When I make a game, it's full of my own expression but ultimately the objective of the game is to make the user happy, and one thing that I'm required to do is not only create my games but also put them in the market at a time when I think people will purchase them. So while a game may contain some of my own personal expression its ultimate objective is not to convey that expression so much as to make people happy.

Being a game developer requires a lot of artistic talent from the designers, such as creativity and finding your own unique nat
ure and finding a way to put that into a game, but at the same time the ultimate product that they're putting out is just a product for consumption.

A lot of people will just continue to make games, and they just make sequel after sequel and the gameplay doesn't change much. When we make, say, a Mario game, we always try to find that new idea or that new bit of creativity that goes into the Mario game, so that if you look back at past Mario games and the ones we're doing now they're different. In that sense being a developer requires a lot of artistic expression and being able to get in touch with your creativity and find ways to put that into the game, but I don't necessarily thing that that means video games are an art.

Games do have very artistic elements and could be partially considered an artform but at the same time, because the ultimate goal of the game is to reach as wide an audience as possible, I think that the focus of game design is not so much on the artistic expression as it is on the actual design of the gameplay. When we make a game I don't just draw out a picture and give it to my designers and say: "Here, I need you to make this game". We look at the actual structure of the gameplay and we start from that core and design outwards.

It's kind of a different process I think. The opera for instance is very interesting and can be fun and a lot of people consider opera to be 'art' and very artistic but really if you get down to it, all the opera is is entertainment. And of course long ago when people were writing plays, when they were writing the script for their own play in their theatre, if the theatre next door suddenly started running a production that was a very similar idea then all of a sudden the scriptwriter would re-write his script completely.

So that's probably one of the reasons that you used to see a lot of stories where things wouldn't line up at all and you'd have these crazy stories that didn't match together and people would say: "Oh, that's brilliant artistic expression" but (laughs) really it's probably more often because they were forced to change things at the last second because of other things in the market.

Paul Davies
But aren't you being compromised in a sense? If you just did whatever you wanted to do and disregarded the market, what would that be?

Miyamoto:
I don't think what I would create would change much, because what I want to do is create things that are going to make people happy and give them enjoyment. But on the other hand I never go out to the market and say "what game do you want?" and then come back to my office and go to work and try and make that game. That's because everyone in the market will say "Oh, I want... what's popular right now".

Paul Davies
Microsoft has showed a very strong focus on online gaming this year. What is the reason why Nintendo isn't taking part in that area of the business and what's your personal opinion about online gaming for consoles.

Miyamoto:
Nintendo isn't saying that we're not interested in doing anything online and myself as a games creator, certainly I'm not saying that I don't want to do anything online. What's we're saying is that as a business, online is not viable right now and we don't want to go into online unless we make a viable business from that.

Until we reach that point, we're not going to go in that direction. But we have Mario Kart on the showfloor this year with a local area network and we've got eight GameCubes hooked up together. And although we're not showing it on the showfloor, Kirby Air Ride is another game that will be linkable via network cables. And we're doing experiments with Animal Crossing in Japan where you'll be able to use SD memory cards and actually transfer data over the standard Internet.

Entertainment is kind of interesting - Rubik's Cube is probably the best example of this - the thing about enter
tainment is that you can put it in a store and someone walking by can see it in the window and say "Oh, that looks fun and that looks entertaining". They can walk in and they can buy it, pay 20 dollars or whatever and take it home and play it, and it's accessible to everybody.

But the thing about the Internet is that its not accessible to everybody, there are still a lot of people who do not have Internet access and I think the most important thing for entertainment is that it has to remain something that it available to everybody. Because of that I think that Nintendo's main focus will never to limit their base to one certain group.

Paul Davies
Since you first showed Zelda at Spaceworld with cel-shaded graphics, and later when you released Mario Sunshine, there has been a very strong rumour that you're developing two different Zeldas and two different Marios - one that you actually wanted to make, the cel-shaded one, and the one that the fans wanted; not very different from Mario 64 but with upgraded graphics. Is there truth to this rumour or if not how do you envision the next Zelda and Mario?

Miyamoto:
We never really work with that intention. We're always doing different experiments within EAD. and I guess in that sense the rumour is somewhat true in that we did do experiments with a more realistic Zelda and the toon-shaded Zelda of the Wind Waker.

In the case of Mario obviously we were doing work on the Mario 128 demo that we were showing at Spaceworld, and separately we were doing work on experiments that we made into Mario Sunshine. That has absolutely nothing to do with us trying to make something that we think the users want versus me trying to make something that I want to make.

As to what's going to come next for those franchises, it's not that there's a plan for what we're planning to make, what we're going to do is look at our experiments and out of all of them we're going to find the one that's most fun and exciting and can eventually evolve into the next versions of those games.

As for what that's going to be I can't say right now. But the thing about games development now is that it's getting more and more difficult to create games because the graphics are so complex and require so much time to create. Obviously if you don't have the staff that are talented enough they'll never be able to put together a game. It's true that we have a team that focuses on an existing sample or an existing model and improving upon that idea and building it into a new type of game. We also have staff that focus exclusively on creating completely new ideas that we've never seen before.

Paul Davies
So if Mr. Iwata made a point in the press conference saying that Nintendo's favourite franchises will be the cornerstone of your strategy for the next few years, in what time frame could we expect the next Zelda or the next Mario?

Miyamoto:
Right now we do intend to use the system we've developed for the Wind Waker to go and make another instalment in the Zelda series. And we did use the more realistic Link experiments in Soul Calibur II, and I'm sure there would be a lot of people who would be happy to see more of that.

As for Mario Sunshine, it would be very easy to take the Sunshine engine and create a sequel to that but really right now what we're focussing on is what really is fun, and how can we take that and find a way to make it accessible to a much broader audience.