Wii Fit and Wii Music are both linked to your personal interests – did they share a similar creative process?
The creative process of Wii Music was actually very different. I saw what was fun about raising a dog and created Nintendogs. With Wii Fit I started weighing myself every day in the hope of becoming more healthy and I found something that was fun and interesting in that and turned it into a videogame.

Rather than finding an impetus in something and turning it into a videogame, Wii Music has been an answer to my long life as a struggling musician. I’ve played instruments and been a fan of music for many, many years. The one problem I’ve never been able to resolve is that while I wish I was good enough to perform for people, no matter how much I practiced I still feel that my instrument performance is not very good. It feels to me like I’ve spent the last 30 years trying to become a musician and finally, with Wii Music, I’ve created an instrument that allows me to have that experience. It’s almost the answer to a long-standing problem that I’ve been faced with.


Other music games including Rhythm Tengoku, Guitar Hero and Rock Band have had great success all over the world – did their success confirm to you that there was a strong market for music games?
Actually, I did not think about other music software at all when we were developing Wii Music. The reason why we started the project was due to the original concept of Wii itself. We wanted Wii to become the machine that would be located in the family living room where families would be together and enjoy using it. So music was something we wanted to work on.

Simultaneously, I have been playing instruments myself. For many years I have been thinking that I really wanted to make software with which people could enjoy playing with musical instruments. And then, when we had the opportunity to work with the Wii Remote’s brand-new interface, it gave me the inspiration that finally we could take advantage of it to mimic the play style of music instruments. So that’s the background.

When it comes to the existence of other music software, maybe I should say I wish for the success of other music software, but Nintendo and I myself really don’t like to be compared to something already exists in the market. We really want to try to be different from the others [laughs].

I don’t like it when someone asks me whether it’s due to the popularity of other music software that I wanted to make music software. If it wasn’t for the success of other software people wouldn’t ask! [Laughs]