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"NYT on DS - Yamauchi's idea, tilt left out due to cost, final price
will be
< $200
"To keep costs down, Mr. Miyamoto said, some features were left out of
the DS. Maybe next time, he said, he will be able to include a tilt
sensor for gyroscopic control."
now here's the entire article
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/13/technology/circuits/13play.html
_______________________________________________________________________________
May 13, 2004
Taking the Game War to a Second Front
By STEPHEN TOTILO
LOS ANGELES, May 12 - A man in dark jeans and a Super Mario T-shirt
slipped behind a pillar on the upper floor of Nintendo's
42,000-square-foot outpost at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, the
giant annual video-game trade show also known as E3. Unseen, he made
his presence known with a handwritten message zapped onto an unusual
new hand-held gaming system called the Nintendo DS.
"I'm Shigeru Miyamoto," he wrote with a stylus on the lower screen of
his DS, a clamshell two-screen gaming device shaped like an inch-thick
checkbook. The words appeared on the top screen of a second DS, whose
user scribbled an electronic reply.
Mr. Miyamoto, Japan's most renowned game designer and Nintendo's
senior managing director, has been communicating with Western
audiences through video games since 1981, when he conceived the arcade
game Donkey Kong. Now 51, he has also created Nintendo icons like
Mario, Luigi and Zelda and directed the best sellers Super Mario
Brothers 3 (1989) and The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time (1998),
hailed in the video-game press as among the greatest games ever.
As E3 unfolds here this week, his mission is to convince the industry
and its followers - including the designers and publishers Nintendo
hopes to recruit to create games for its new machine - that what
players need next is a device with two screens.
It may be a challenge. Many in this audience wonder if Nintendo's
house of ideas can withstand a steamrolling Sony, which is using the
trade show to unveil its own hand-held game device, the PlayStation
Portable. The Sony entry, known as the PSP, plays games, movies and
music and has been billed by its corporate parent as the Walkman of
the 21st century.
The PlayStation Portable is another volley in Sony's decadelong effort
to best Nintendo, having first removed it from its position as the
market leader in home video-game consoles. Now it is seeking to knock
it from its perch atop the hand-held market: Nintendo enjoys
near-total control in what Jupiter Research estimates is a $1.6
billion hand-held business that includes the Game Boy Advance.
By year's end, the DS (under a name yet to be announced) will join the
hand-held ranks; the Sony PSP will arrive in Japan late this year and
in North America and Europe in early 2005.
Nintendo's president, Satoru Iwata, 44, said the company was already
working on a new hand-held when the Sony PSP was announced a year ago,
but that Sony's move stimulated his developers' creativity. "I think
it has triggered great motivation" among Nintendo's developers, he
said through a translator - so much so "that they really have to come
up with great changes in their games."
The DS's unusual design took shape a year ago after a visit from a
former Nintendo president, Hiroshi Yamauchi, an outspoken 50-year
veteran of the company, who reviewed the efforts of hardware design
teams to create a new hand-held game machine.
"Basically we were all focused on bigger, faster," Mr. Miyamoto said
through a translator. "And then Mr. Yamauchi came down and said:
'Knock it off. We want something unique, something brand new. Do
something on two screens.' "
That directive was a classic Nintendo move, according to P. J.
McNealy, an analyst for American Technology Research, who said the
company has long been known to skimp on technology in favor of
focusing on finding unexpected ways to change game play.
Mr. McNealy said the need for that strategy had intensified as
Nintendo faced stiff competition from richer companies like Sony and
Microsoft. "Nintendo has to keep up by either being more creative at a
cheaper price or investing more money," he said. "The DS is a good
example of creativity while not breaking the budget."
The company's games-first philosophy has led Nintendo, unlike its
competitors, to exclude options like DVD playback from its home
consoles. It also led to its current approach of searching for new
ways to excite gamers. Mr. Iwata said that a recent slowdown in the
Japanese game market indicated that simply improving graphical
capabilities, the usual approach, would not attract consumers. "People
in the industry are looking forward to some kind of sea change," Mr.
Iwata said.
Mr. Miyamoto agreed, suggesting that a focus on technology would limit
creativity. He is undeterred by estimates that the Sony PSP's bigger,
higher-definition single screen can exhibit graphics on par with the
current-generation PlayStation 2, or that the graphics of the Nintendo
DS, while far superior to those on the Game Boy Advance, are closer to
those seen in the higher-end last-generation Nintendo 64 games. "We
weren't trying to create the next PSP," he said. "We were trying to
create something you hadn't seen before."
And Mr. Miyamoto knows something about innovation. He helped to
popularize side-scrollers, which expanded a video game's landscape
beyond the width of a single fixed screen, in 1985, and he taught
players how to move in three-dimensional space with Super Mario 64 in
1996. While the most obvious innovations of the DS - touch screens and
a visual display across multiple screens - are not cutting-edge, they
are unexplored in video games. Still, they may not be easy to sell on
the theoretical level.
"At the beginning there was a collective, 'What the heck?' " said
Kevin Ray, the chief technical officer of Majesco, a prominent Game
Boy publisher whose company is now working on DS games and who has
since been won over. When Will Kassoy, vice president for global brand
management at Activision, which will also create games for the DS,
found Nintendo fans speculating online that two screens might allow a
game to depict a character from a third-person perspective in one
screen and a first-person perspective in another, he wondered how
people could play that way.
Mr. Miyamoto's demonstrations at E3 alleviate the confusion. In some,
the second screen provides room for a map or other supplemental
information that might have fit on a TV screen but would have
cluttered a hand-held view. In many cases, the lower screen becomes a
touch-sensitive control interface, adopting the interactive image of a
xylophone or submarine control panel.
The ideas vary widely. In one demonstration, a stylus is used to
"carve" a spinning watermelon; in one created by the publisher Namco,
players can draw Pac-Man and then direct their careening Pac-Man
doodle to eat his ghostly opponents.
The features, which also include voice-recognition technology and a
wireless connection to as many as 16 other DS units (or, in a Nintendo
first, a Wi-Fi link to the PC), have attracted more than 100
developers, Mr. Iwata said. In addition, the DS will play Game Boy
Advance cartridges and its own.
Atari's chief executive, Bruno Bonnell, said that working on the DS is
"like moving from a car to a train - it's really a new way of
traveling in interactive space." He said the shift would harness the
increasing ability of video-game players to consume and synthesize
data. "I believe we are just escalating what I call the skill of the
mutant boys," he said, "which is the capacity of the kids tomorrow to
analyze what's going on in multiple screens in real time."
Mr. Miyamoto said he hoped that the DS would also appeal to those
intimidated by modern game controllers and alienated by games that
require the button-pushing skills of longtime players. While the DS
does include a traditional button interface, he said, its touch screen
is so different that "this is a chance for us to bring everybody back
and put them all at the starting line again."
The question is whether the DS will give Nintendo the arsenal it needs
to withstand the Sony PSP's assault. The hand-held market - which is
to say, the Game Boy market - is primarily made up of Pokemon-playing
children and Tetris-loving adults. In a survey of 5,000 teenagers and
adults conducted by Jupiter Research last year, only one-third of
hand-held owners were 18 to 34, an age bracket that accounts for more
than half of the ownership of the home console leader, Sony's
PlayStation 2. That missing 18-to-34 audience on the hand-held is the
PSP's "primary target,'' said Kaz Hirai, president and chief executive
of Sony Computer Entertainment America.
Mr. Ray of Majesco said the dual screens of Nintendo's machine could
open the portable market to more sophisticated games and advance the
age of the typical Nintendo hand-held owner, yet Sony is hoping to
capture that prospective 18-to-34 hand-held owner all at once with the
PSP. Sony entered and took the lead in the console market in the
mid-1990's by going after older users and by wooing developers with a
pioneering CD-based format that made it cheaper and easier to create
games. Sony's entry into the market with the disc-based PSP is an
attempt to repeat that history.
Backbone Entertainment's senior producer, Chris Charla, who is
intrigued by the DS but is working on the PSP's first announced title,
Death Jr., expects Sony's technology-first approach to impose its own
sea change on the industry. He said that the PSP's PS2 graphical
quality and the lower development costs of a hand-held would enable
developers to do console-quality work on a hand-held budget.
"Up until now, if you wanted to make a top-quality game, you had to
spend top-quality money," he said. "You could never do, for lack of a
better example, 'My Big Fat Greek Wedding' on a video game system."
Still, Mr. Miyamoto says he is confident that the Nintendo DS's
innovative features will assure the machine's success, though he is
not without regrets.
Nintendo has diligently marketed each rendition of the Game Boy at or
below a mass-market price of $99 and, while not announcing a price at
the trade show, indicated that the DS would be value-priced. (Mr.
Iwata said the cost would be under $200.)
To keep costs down, Mr. Miyamoto said, some features were left out of
the DS. Maybe next time, he said, he will be able to include a tilt
sensor for gyroscopic control. For now, he is focused on double
screens.
_______________________________________________________________________________
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/13/technology/circuits/13play.html
"NYT on DS - Yamauchi's idea, tilt left out due to cost, final price
will be
< $200
"To keep costs down, Mr. Miyamoto said, some features were left out of
the DS. Maybe next time, he said, he will be able to include a tilt
sensor for gyroscopic control."
now here's the entire article
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/13/technology/circuits/13play.html
_______________________________________________________________________________
May 13, 2004
Taking the Game War to a Second Front
By STEPHEN TOTILO
LOS ANGELES, May 12 - A man in dark jeans and a Super Mario T-shirt
slipped behind a pillar on the upper floor of Nintendo's
42,000-square-foot outpost at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, the
giant annual video-game trade show also known as E3. Unseen, he made
his presence known with a handwritten message zapped onto an unusual
new hand-held gaming system called the Nintendo DS.
"I'm Shigeru Miyamoto," he wrote with a stylus on the lower screen of
his DS, a clamshell two-screen gaming device shaped like an inch-thick
checkbook. The words appeared on the top screen of a second DS, whose
user scribbled an electronic reply.
Mr. Miyamoto, Japan's most renowned game designer and Nintendo's
senior managing director, has been communicating with Western
audiences through video games since 1981, when he conceived the arcade
game Donkey Kong. Now 51, he has also created Nintendo icons like
Mario, Luigi and Zelda and directed the best sellers Super Mario
Brothers 3 (1989) and The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time (1998),
hailed in the video-game press as among the greatest games ever.
As E3 unfolds here this week, his mission is to convince the industry
and its followers - including the designers and publishers Nintendo
hopes to recruit to create games for its new machine - that what
players need next is a device with two screens.
It may be a challenge. Many in this audience wonder if Nintendo's
house of ideas can withstand a steamrolling Sony, which is using the
trade show to unveil its own hand-held game device, the PlayStation
Portable. The Sony entry, known as the PSP, plays games, movies and
music and has been billed by its corporate parent as the Walkman of
the 21st century.
The PlayStation Portable is another volley in Sony's decadelong effort
to best Nintendo, having first removed it from its position as the
market leader in home video-game consoles. Now it is seeking to knock
it from its perch atop the hand-held market: Nintendo enjoys
near-total control in what Jupiter Research estimates is a $1.6
billion hand-held business that includes the Game Boy Advance.
By year's end, the DS (under a name yet to be announced) will join the
hand-held ranks; the Sony PSP will arrive in Japan late this year and
in North America and Europe in early 2005.
Nintendo's president, Satoru Iwata, 44, said the company was already
working on a new hand-held when the Sony PSP was announced a year ago,
but that Sony's move stimulated his developers' creativity. "I think
it has triggered great motivation" among Nintendo's developers, he
said through a translator - so much so "that they really have to come
up with great changes in their games."
The DS's unusual design took shape a year ago after a visit from a
former Nintendo president, Hiroshi Yamauchi, an outspoken 50-year
veteran of the company, who reviewed the efforts of hardware design
teams to create a new hand-held game machine.
"Basically we were all focused on bigger, faster," Mr. Miyamoto said
through a translator. "And then Mr. Yamauchi came down and said:
'Knock it off. We want something unique, something brand new. Do
something on two screens.' "
That directive was a classic Nintendo move, according to P. J.
McNealy, an analyst for American Technology Research, who said the
company has long been known to skimp on technology in favor of
focusing on finding unexpected ways to change game play.
Mr. McNealy said the need for that strategy had intensified as
Nintendo faced stiff competition from richer companies like Sony and
Microsoft. "Nintendo has to keep up by either being more creative at a
cheaper price or investing more money," he said. "The DS is a good
example of creativity while not breaking the budget."
The company's games-first philosophy has led Nintendo, unlike its
competitors, to exclude options like DVD playback from its home
consoles. It also led to its current approach of searching for new
ways to excite gamers. Mr. Iwata said that a recent slowdown in the
Japanese game market indicated that simply improving graphical
capabilities, the usual approach, would not attract consumers. "People
in the industry are looking forward to some kind of sea change," Mr.
Iwata said.
Mr. Miyamoto agreed, suggesting that a focus on technology would limit
creativity. He is undeterred by estimates that the Sony PSP's bigger,
higher-definition single screen can exhibit graphics on par with the
current-generation PlayStation 2, or that the graphics of the Nintendo
DS, while far superior to those on the Game Boy Advance, are closer to
those seen in the higher-end last-generation Nintendo 64 games. "We
weren't trying to create the next PSP," he said. "We were trying to
create something you hadn't seen before."
And Mr. Miyamoto knows something about innovation. He helped to
popularize side-scrollers, which expanded a video game's landscape
beyond the width of a single fixed screen, in 1985, and he taught
players how to move in three-dimensional space with Super Mario 64 in
1996. While the most obvious innovations of the DS - touch screens and
a visual display across multiple screens - are not cutting-edge, they
are unexplored in video games. Still, they may not be easy to sell on
the theoretical level.
"At the beginning there was a collective, 'What the heck?' " said
Kevin Ray, the chief technical officer of Majesco, a prominent Game
Boy publisher whose company is now working on DS games and who has
since been won over. When Will Kassoy, vice president for global brand
management at Activision, which will also create games for the DS,
found Nintendo fans speculating online that two screens might allow a
game to depict a character from a third-person perspective in one
screen and a first-person perspective in another, he wondered how
people could play that way.
Mr. Miyamoto's demonstrations at E3 alleviate the confusion. In some,
the second screen provides room for a map or other supplemental
information that might have fit on a TV screen but would have
cluttered a hand-held view. In many cases, the lower screen becomes a
touch-sensitive control interface, adopting the interactive image of a
xylophone or submarine control panel.
The ideas vary widely. In one demonstration, a stylus is used to
"carve" a spinning watermelon; in one created by the publisher Namco,
players can draw Pac-Man and then direct their careening Pac-Man
doodle to eat his ghostly opponents.
The features, which also include voice-recognition technology and a
wireless connection to as many as 16 other DS units (or, in a Nintendo
first, a Wi-Fi link to the PC), have attracted more than 100
developers, Mr. Iwata said. In addition, the DS will play Game Boy
Advance cartridges and its own.
Atari's chief executive, Bruno Bonnell, said that working on the DS is
"like moving from a car to a train - it's really a new way of
traveling in interactive space." He said the shift would harness the
increasing ability of video-game players to consume and synthesize
data. "I believe we are just escalating what I call the skill of the
mutant boys," he said, "which is the capacity of the kids tomorrow to
analyze what's going on in multiple screens in real time."
Mr. Miyamoto said he hoped that the DS would also appeal to those
intimidated by modern game controllers and alienated by games that
require the button-pushing skills of longtime players. While the DS
does include a traditional button interface, he said, its touch screen
is so different that "this is a chance for us to bring everybody back
and put them all at the starting line again."
The question is whether the DS will give Nintendo the arsenal it needs
to withstand the Sony PSP's assault. The hand-held market - which is
to say, the Game Boy market - is primarily made up of Pokemon-playing
children and Tetris-loving adults. In a survey of 5,000 teenagers and
adults conducted by Jupiter Research last year, only one-third of
hand-held owners were 18 to 34, an age bracket that accounts for more
than half of the ownership of the home console leader, Sony's
PlayStation 2. That missing 18-to-34 audience on the hand-held is the
PSP's "primary target,'' said Kaz Hirai, president and chief executive
of Sony Computer Entertainment America.
Mr. Ray of Majesco said the dual screens of Nintendo's machine could
open the portable market to more sophisticated games and advance the
age of the typical Nintendo hand-held owner, yet Sony is hoping to
capture that prospective 18-to-34 hand-held owner all at once with the
PSP. Sony entered and took the lead in the console market in the
mid-1990's by going after older users and by wooing developers with a
pioneering CD-based format that made it cheaper and easier to create
games. Sony's entry into the market with the disc-based PSP is an
attempt to repeat that history.
Backbone Entertainment's senior producer, Chris Charla, who is
intrigued by the DS but is working on the PSP's first announced title,
Death Jr., expects Sony's technology-first approach to impose its own
sea change on the industry. He said that the PSP's PS2 graphical
quality and the lower development costs of a hand-held would enable
developers to do console-quality work on a hand-held budget.
"Up until now, if you wanted to make a top-quality game, you had to
spend top-quality money," he said. "You could never do, for lack of a
better example, 'My Big Fat Greek Wedding' on a video game system."
Still, Mr. Miyamoto says he is confident that the Nintendo DS's
innovative features will assure the machine's success, though he is
not without regrets.
Nintendo has diligently marketed each rendition of the Game Boy at or
below a mass-market price of $99 and, while not announcing a price at
the trade show, indicated that the DS would be value-priced. (Mr.
Iwata said the cost would be under $200.)
To keep costs down, Mr. Miyamoto said, some features were left out of
the DS. Maybe next time, he said, he will be able to include a tilt
sensor for gyroscopic control. For now, he is focused on double
screens.
_______________________________________________________________________________
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/13/technology/circuits/13play.html
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