How difficult is it to take consumers who begin gaming through software like Wii Sports and Wii Music and take them into more sophisticated games? And do you think that’s a very important step for Nintendo nowadays?
I think first of all we have to continue to create these new types of games that are going to interest people who otherwise aren’t going to be interested in games. That’s the first step.

In terms of where we go from there, one theory is that you take those people and transition them to the types of game experiences we have all been enjoying for the last 30 years. While there’s certainly value in trying to do that, the thing I think is more important is that entertainment itself is something you need to continue to surprise people with.

The question then is what can we ourselves, or other game creators, do to make new game experiences that are unique, that will continue to surprise wide audiences of people, whether it’s people who have been playing games for a long time, people who are new to games or people who have yet to play games.

I think that what we’ve begun to see with Wii is people have begun to understand videogames, and hopefully they’re understanding that anyone can play videogames. While I’m sure some people will transition over to the types of games we’ve all played for so long, I’m more excited about what Nintendo and all of the developers can do to continue to surprise this now much larger audience.


Do you think we will still be using the Wii Remote and Nunchuk in ten years? Do you hope they’ll become some kind of standard that will replace joypads?
One of the challenges we’ve seen with the videogame industry is that we’ve come so far with what is now considered the classic videogame controller, when you’re so used to using the same thing over and over again over many years, as a creator you run into creative blocks where it’s hard to break out of that mould and come up with new ideas.

Of course, if I were to say that we were going to change the interface right away in the next generation, the people who have been learning to work with these controllers would be upset. But I would think that somewhere down the road you might find a way to make an even more intuitive type of interface that might make it even easier for people to interact with videogames.

I think that at some point in the future we’ll probably see some type of change.


Beyond Wii MotionPlus?
That’s a good example of how we make improvements of what has become the standard controller and we’ll see that evolve and, again, we’ll likely come to a point where people might run into those creative blocks after they’ve explored all of the opportunities for that controller. And then we’ll move on to another new and different type of controller.


When you one day retire, what do you want to be remembered for?
I often look at the pattern that we’ve seen with the Japanese manga industry and hope that I can have something like that.

If you look at the history of Japanese manga you have the very early manga artists like Osamu Tezuka, who really defined the style and continued to pioneer in that realm and draw new manga and created new styles along the way. I think the other key thing about them is that they continued drawing up until the day they died.

I would be happiest if people look back some day and say this is somebody who was there when videogames first started being created and he’s somebody who was continually creating new styles of play and was bringing new ideas to games and was a pioneer up until his dying day.