Miyamoto talks up Wii-mote

While Nintendo has thoroughly explained the reasons why it bucked tradition and went with a motion-sensitive controller for the Wii, some may wonder how exactly the idea was conceived. In an interview with Shigeru Miyamoto on Nintendo's Japanese Web site, the creator of Zelda, Mario, and Donkey Kong shed a little more light on the creative process.

Miyamoto has previously stated that user friendliness is central to the Wii, an idea that he reiterates in the interview. "I didn't want something that would make people nervous about trying to use it at first glance. Rather, the goal was to make anyone who sees it want to try it out. However, as someone who has always made games, it had to be capable of playing past software."

In the process of contemplating how to make a controller that was not intimidating but still allowed for traditional game play, Miyamoto had this realization: "There's no need to use both hands." He added that the idea was to break the existing conventions a little but not too much.

"If you go too far off the deep end, the product will be 'eccentric for the sake of being eccentric,'" Miyamoto said. "This probably works for some specific games, but it won't succeed in creating a new standard." By way of compromise, Miyamoto says: "We were as daring as possible, without being overly eccentric."