How the Wii Was Born

saintory writes "Ars Technica has an article up looking at how the Wii was born. It's a nice overview of how Nintendo's culture came up with the 'new-gen' system." More from the article: "'Diverging from the road map takes a fair amount of courage,' [Engineer Shiota] said, 'especially when we didn't have a clear image of what we were going to do with this hardware.' However, once he saw the power level reduction (from one-third to as little as one-fourth that of current hardware) he was very excited. Instead of competing on 'how many more times the CPU is going to be faster, how much more memory is going to be on the machine, and how many more polygons can be rendered' he saw Nintendo as being able to do something different and unique."

Comments

Interview translations

[neutralstone]

For those of you who can't get your interview translations fast enough: it seems that Nintendo Europe has been updating theirs faster than NOA.

Re:Space constraints

[Frag-A-Muffin]

Which makes me wonder, why they still came up with something that's clearly designed to live vertically. Something with the form factor of the typical DVD player or set-top box would fit in amongst many people's setups even easier than the Wii in its standard orientation.

Spoken like the truly uninformed. I guess this is /. so I shouldn't expect much :)

Watch this, and watch how Matt takes the Wii out of the vertical stand, and lays it flat. Hmmm ... even has rubber feet so it can lay horizontally.

Re:Power Consumption

[twistedsymphony]

I'm sure a power consumption analysis will be done... it's been done for the current consoles

Re:Power Consumption

[wolrahnaes]

I have a Kill-A-Watt and actually have a gamecube attached to it right now. Here's what I've seen:

Standby (power off): 0w, no draw
Idle (power on, no disc): 21-22w
Game (3" disc): 22-23w
Game (5" disc): 23-24w

The various gadgetry on my desk (PC, LCD, IP phone, wireless router, Xbox 360, various chargers, and alarm clock) pull more power as a whole in standby mode than the Gamecube does when playing a game off discs too large to even fit in a stock console.