Shigeru Miyamoto and Satoru Iwata Q&A
We sit down for a face-to-face interview with Shigeru Miyamoto and Satoru Iwata to talk about past projects and Nintendo's plans for the future.
GS: In terms of the GameCube content, do you still feel that quality is more important than quantity?
SM: Definitely, from a business perspective, I think that quality over quantity is very important and quality software is much more important than just a large number of software titles. However, looking back to the N64 era, I think it is true that perhaps we didn't have as many titles and as much quantity out there as we maybe we could have. So, with that in mind, going forward with the GameCube, I think you can expect to see more titles than maybe there were on the N64. But quality is still our main focus. And, that is really, from a business standpoint, what we want our focus on.
Satoru Iwata: When it comes to game size and the size of different games on the GameCube, the games are not all going to be very small and very short in terms of playtime. As a matter of fact, Star Fox Adventures, which we're going to be releasing in the first half of this year, is actually going to be a very large-scale game, and I think people will look forward to that. And when it comes to numbers, really what we're talking about is looking at not releasing similar types of games that will be competing against one another, but having a number of different styles of games.
The other thing that's interesting about the consoles is that you see a lot of people who really try to compete based on the number of titles that they have for their consoles. And, to me, it's really not about, "How many titles do I have out there?" The real question is, "How many titles do I have that people actually want to buy?" Because, really, the unique thing about the hardware is that, unless there's something for that hardware that you want to buy, the hardware itself does nothing for you. So, even if you have 100 games out there, if nobody's interested in playing them, the hardware doesn't do you any good.
GS: Along the lines of software, how will Nintendo go about managing GameCube content to avoid slow periods? It was a problem during the N64 period, and it seems to be cropping up now.
SM: I'm sorry! [laughs] But actually I think that that problem is going to be resolved within the next six months. When you look at our third-party support for the latter half of this year, there are going to be a lot of games coming out for the GameCube. Almost to the point where one could say there's going to be almost too many. And actually the latter half of this year is also going to be very strong for first- and second-party software--you're going to see a lot of those titles coming out. We did have titles lined up for the first quarter and the first half of this year that, for a variety of reasons, we were not able to launch. Some of them related to the effects of the terror attack on the US, which we could not foresee, and some of them related to simple scheduling problems that arose with games and caused them to slip--and when I say slip I mean by, you know, two or three months. So really, as we get into the second, the third, and particularly the fourth quarter of this year, we're going to see a much stronger line with much less time between launches, and I think everybody's going to have a lot to look forward to.
SI: So, when we talk about a stronger lineup, we're talking about titles that people are going to want to play. We're talking about major titles like Star Fox Adventures, Mario Sunshine, Metroid, and The Legend of Zelda--all coming out this year.
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