Nintendo's Shinya Takahashi and Hisashi Nogami talk doubt during the Wii days, making games for everyone, Miyamoto's position, and the challenge of game creation

Believe it or not, Nintendo has been around for 130 years. While they bounced from idea to idea early on, Nintendo truly hit their stride when they entered the video game market. Making games has been Nintendo's bread and butter for years now, and there's definitely no signs of the company stopping! In an interview with the Guardian, Nintendo's Shinya Takahashi and Hisashi Nogami address some topics that have come up during their time with the company.

Internal doubt about the Wii

Takahashi: “Even among our developers there are often doubts! When the Wii remote was first introduced as a concept, the reaction was: what is that? Is it real? Will it actually work? But once we’d all tried it, we were surprised and delighted by it, and that made us realise that it was going to work out. With the Nintendo Switch, we all knew the concept, but when we picked up the prototype for the first time and saw Mario Kart running perfectly on the smaller screen, we were flabbergasted. Even people who are well aware of the concept and design can’t always tell if something’s going to work.”

Combining different types of devs to make games for everyone

Takahashi: “Right now, because people of different generations are now working together, they’re always coming up with different ideas about how best to provide a meaningful surprise to players. And I think our job is combining these different ideas to create brand new ways of entertaining people. If we notice that only the senior male employees are gathering together to discuss an idea, one of us will say: we need to get some different perspectives on this.”

What Miyamoto does within the company right now

Takahasi: “He is not involved in the minute details of development, but does oversee entire projects and identifies major issues: this part is bad, this part is bad, THIS part is bad …. If he says something’s good, it’s rare, and you know it is. He’s actually a shy person – even when he thinks something is well done, he would not often say that to someone directly.”

On more people playing games, and the scramble to try and entertain them all

Takahashi: “Thirty years ago, if we asked the question, ‘Do you play games?’, the answer might have been yes or no. Now, if we ask the same question, the great majority of people are going to say yes … We are trying to entertain [all] those people. Like a swan, we look elegant above the surface. But underneath the water, we might be paddling like crazy.”