Live Blog: Nintendo’s Satoru Iwata Keynotes GDC 2011
- By Chris Kohler
- March 2, 2011 |
- 11:37 am |
- Categories: Events, Portable Gaming
SAN FRANCISCO — Nintendo’s ready to kick things off at Game Developers Conference.
At 9 a.m. Pacific, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata will take the main stage at GDC 2011 to talk about the last 25 years of gaming, the post-Super Mario era. But since this is a GDC keynote, he is also expected to drop some big news about Nintendo 3DS, or Wii, or something else entirely.
Across the street, Apple is prepping for its own conference, presumably about the iPad 2.
Wired.com is in the convention center seated comfortably. Live blog coverage begins now.
8:33 — Front row center. Rumor going around that Charlie Sheen will be on stage. Ha ha! Except you never know with that guy.
8:44 — If you’re following along at home, you can play GDC Keynote Bingo courtesy NeoGAF member Cheesemeister.
8:53 — Apparently my seat position means that I will appear in many different photos of the audience for this event. Look for me in your favorite newspaper tomorrow! (Note: Newspapers are a thing people used to read in the morning.)
9:00 — It’s starting now! Right on time! Sit down!
9:01 — GDC director Meggan Scavio takes the stage to introduce Iwata and welcome people to the 25th GDC.
9:02 — Some A/V person screws up and accidentally plays part of a Zelda: Skyward Sword trailer while Scavio is giving her introduction. Whoops!
9:04 — Iwata on stage, talking about what game developers are saying these days — quoting Lorne Lanning as saying there’s not much “stability,” Mike Capps of Epic saying that people are taking “bigger gambles.”
9:05 — But what we need to remember most, he says, is “Content is king.” Without quality content, says Iwata, there is nothing — there is no game industry. “You are the center of the videogame universe,” he tells the assembled developers.
9:06 — Iwata getting into his historical discussion of the last 25 years. Shows an old photo of himself with long hair when he worked at HAL Laboratory programming games.
9:07 — “I believed that the software I was making was technically superior to Mr. Miyamoto’s.” But, he says, it is the job of game developers to learn from each other, and Miyamoto’s games outsold his by a “huge margin.” Engineering, he realized, was not as important as imagination.
9:09 — Talking about how teams used to be smaller and people had to wear many different hats — one day you were a game designer, the next day you were a sound designer, the next day you had to decide who was going to go out and buy food for everybody. “We were videogame cavemen,” he said — primitive, compared to today.
9:11 — Expanding the audience for games has been a major strategy for Nintendo, he says. He’s been trying to figure out how big the growth is — not just in terms of sales, but in terms of who the players of each device are. Nintendo has been conducting large-scale surveys twice a year throughout the world, ever since 2005, he says.
9:13 — The number of active players of traditional game consoles jumped up from 2007 to 2010, Iwata says. The DS and Wii have been the “driving force in expanding the U.S. gaming population,” he says.
9:15 — Social network games and social games are two different things, Iwata says. He’s describing what a social network is and points out that the leading activity on these networks is games. “But this is much different than broadly defining a game as ’social,’” he says. An early computer videogame called Spacewar was the first game to offer head-to-head competition, he said, and people played it across early networks.
9:17 — Game consoles like Atari 2600 and NES used to include two controllers. Creating multiplayer games using handheld systems was harder, he says, but millions of people used cables to play Tetris head-to-head on Game Boy. Pokemon continued this trend, and included wireless communication starting in 2004.
9:19 — Name-checks Call of Duty and Microsoft’s “considerable investment” into Xbox Live as other major inroads into “social gaming.”
9:20 — “Must-have” features are the kinds of things that every gamer wants, lest he be left behind. Sometimes this can be delivered by hardware. For example, the first Game Boy — for the first time, games could be carried and played wherever you go. But, he says, creating “must-have” with technology alone is not easy.
9:21 — Name-checks Angry Birds in a list of “must-have” games that also includes Sonic, Tetris and Guitar Hero.
9:22 — But another way to have a “must-have” product is to create that social experience — like World of Warcraft.
9:33 — Mario has remained popular “only because he has changed.” Mario games need to evolve always and keep presenting new experiences.
9:25 — Tetris was the first game to attract a female audience in a meaningful way. There was also The Sims. “Many of you predicted it would never find an audience,” he said, “because there was no way to win or lose.” The series has sold 125 million copies.
9:26 — “Must-have” games offer “universal appeal,” he says. He wants people to attend the Donkey Kong panel tomorrow where they will talk about how they made it a global game.
9:28 — Speaking of globalization, he points out that Kirby’s original name was “Tinkle Popo.” Laughs. Nintendo of America changed his color from pink to white because they didn’t think a pink character would fly in the U.S. “Maybe they didn’t think I would notice. I did.”
9:30 — “Let me return to the idea of ‘must-have’ in terms of the future. Selfishly, I hope people decide the next ‘must-have’ is the Nintendo 3DS.” Laughs.
9:31 — Nintendo selected the pre-installed software on the 3DS for a reason, Iwata says: They will “compel social interaction” and make people say “Hey, you’ve got to see this!”
9:32 — At Nintendo’s headquarters, employees have been leaving their workstations, wandering the building to collect data on their 3DS. Iwata says he’s one of them.
9:33 — “Nintendo can do better,” he says. “Our WiiWare and DSiWare services have not operated as well as they should.”
Photo: Chris Kohler/Wired.com
Chris Kohler is the founder and editor of Wired.com's Game|Life, and the author of Power-Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life. He likes curry.Follow @kobunheat and @GameLife on Twitter.
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