CG Exclusive: Interview With Shigeru Miyamoto

Miyamoto-san talks about Wii Fit, upending tea tables, and why Donkey Kong is so $@#%ing hard.
5/20/2008 12:00 AM | 0 Comments | Page 2 of 3

Crispy Gamer: How has that changed with the advent of home consoles?

Miyamoto: With home consoles, you don't have the time constraints that you'd have in an arcade. The question then became, with a limitless time frame, what can you do within that structure to try to keep people entertained and engaged?

Crispy Gamer: Describe your level of techiness.

Miyamoto: It boils down to this: Any kind of computer or program is always going to suffer from some kind of limitation on the technology side. What I learned is that, in order to design my games, I need to understand, more than anything else, what those limitations are.

So, I studied programming not in the sense of learning how to program, but in the sense of learning how a program works, and how a programmer thinks, and how a program thinks. Then I was able to take my ideas for what I wanted a game to be and make a flow chart that would help the programmer understand what I wanted to create, how I wanted it to work, and how they might be able to represent that in a programming sense.

Of course, the other aspect of this that I learned to take into account is that your game program is going to be running on a specific piece of hardware. The Donkey Kong arcade game is running on a specific circuit board, a specific processor, and those pieces of hardware have certain limitations. For example, you have limitations on the number of colors that can be shown on-screen at one time, you have a limitation on the number of dots or pixels that the program can draw at one time, and you have a limitation on how fast the CPU or the computer processor runs while it is calculating all of this. I learned how to take those limitations into account as well, to try to maximize what I was able to do on-screen within those limitations.

Of course, technology has advanced since those days to the point where it feels like the hardware has almost limitless capabilities. So I'm finding these days that part of my job as a game designer includes choosing from this near-limitless palette of functions and capabilities and deciding which ones we should use with our hardware systems.

Crispy Gamer: The Wii is obviously the least powerful of the next-gen consoles, and yet it's the most successful. Explain.

Miyamoto: Well, while it's technically true that the Wii, in comparison to the other consoles that are of this generation, has less power than the other consoles, but I would say that in comparison to the other computer and processing devices that are out there in the world, the Wii has a great deal of power under the hood. So in that sense, I don't want people to be confused and think that the Wii is a low-tech device.

As a device that is focused solely on interactive experiences, it's a very powerful device. As for why it succeeds, you have to look back to the time of Donkey Kong. At the time of Donkey Kong, videogames were something fresh and new to everybody, and everybody saw them as something that was fun and interesting. And then with the Nintendo Entertainment System, you could take that fresh and exciting experience, and you could have that experience in your home. So that itself was very unique, and people were very excited about that.