Nintendo on balancing fun and technological development
This information comes from Nintendo’s Corporate Management Policy Briefing for the fiscal year ending March 2021…
Shigeru Miyamoto (Representative Director, Fellow): You might know the phrase “lateral thinking with withered technology” from Gunpei Yokoi, who was the head of Nintendo’s development department at one time. It means that innovative ideas can lead to completely new entertainment using technology that already exists, which is easier for developers to work with, and this type of entertainment can be mass produced at a price that puts it well within reach of consumers. We do use some cutting-edge technology these days, but the most important thing about how we use technology is that we create something that anyone can play with simple and intuitive controls. Nintendo puts a lot of importance on our approach to development by carefully selecting or developing technologies that consumers can use without needing to struggle with complicated controls.
As an example, we believe that one of the factors that contributed to the global popularity of the Nintendo Entertainment System was that it started running as soon as you turned it on, and all you needed to do is just press the Reset Button if you had a problem. And when Game Boy first launched, many people wondered why we used a monochrome LCD screen instead of color, but monochrome LCDs came with a significantly longer battery life and were easy to see under direct sunlight, which allowed players to enjoy their games outdoors. Those are just some examples of our approach to creating products that we believe consumers can enjoy comfortably. I hope you will look forward to
our future products.Shinya Takahashi (Director, Senior Managing Executive Officer): The importance of balancing software and technology lies in how smoothly we are able to implement what we believe will be fun player experiences – that goes for hardware development in both the past and future. Although software developers like us often ask challenging things of the hardware developers with an eye to fully realize our entertainment concepts, I’m grateful to all the hardware developers who go through the trial and error that leads to the best solutions for us. We intend to continue to utilize our unique strength of integrating software and hardware development.
Ko Shiota (Director, Senior Executive Officer): There are a lot of different technologies available now, and as an engineer, I feel we’ve really entered a good era. Even so, there is also the dilemma in which the more technology you try to adopt, the more development resources are required. What we value is how much that technology contributes to fun experiences, and how comfortably a consumer can play. We make our selections based on an earnest evaluation of the necessity and possibilities of each technology from this perspective. When developing Nintendo’s unique forms of play, there are times when we are unable to just use existing technology, so we focus on proactively committing resources toward the development of technology in pursuit of fun and comfortable experiences.
