At the tail end of a new interview with Edge which dealt primarily with Wii Music (but somehow failed to ask about the game’s lackluster sales), Nintendo’s legendary designer Shigeru Miyamoto has admitted that the Wiimote-Nunchuk combo is not the be-all, end-all of gaming controllers.
In fact, he hints that Nintendo may be considering new possibilities already.
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.
Hear that? In the mind of Miyamoto, the Wii Remote is the standard controller, joypads are classic, and new solutions may already be under consideration — but possibly put on hold because of a potential backlash.
Another interesting tidbit from the interview is a discussion of Miyamoto’s retirement plans. As usual, there aren’t any.
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.
The full interview is available right here.
Leave a Reply