Slashdot Mirror
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."
Well, while the Wii certainly doesn't look like system providing next-gen graphics, I guess the article makes an interesting point though... with development costs of modern games going through the roof, it might make perfect sense to design a simple system (from a hardware perspective) like their new console.
Also, does next-gen necessarily have to mean next-gen graphics? Or does good-enough-graphics with a fresh look on gameplay suffice?
The interview itself has been posted in pieces over the past few weeks, starting with this segment. It's been ongoing, and it's pretty interesting stuff, if you're into that sort of thing. There was a story posted on Slashdot a week or two ago that mentioned it, even, but it hardly had any replies, so I don't know if that's a sign that no one read it, or what.
Anyway, as I posted on that story back then, among other things, the interview mentions some things that I've seen people here talking about, like the possibility of distributing independent games via the Virtual Console system. They seem to be considering it and possibly in favor of it as high up as Iwata. It goes into a whole lot more detail than the Ars Technica summary does, and the more recent segments talk about some of the software design elements, not just the hardware side of things. Interesting reading.
"Then again, developers may be happy that they don't have to spend upwards of $50 million just to get a game out the door because Nintendo is forcing them to make sure it works in SD, 480p, 720p, 1080i, and maybe 1080p."
But they're spending that money anyways to get the game to also run on the 360 and PS3. Honestly, the best thing I can see about the Wii is that the new controller will force 3rd party developers to actually think about the port to Wii instead of it just being an afterthought. For example, EA is already talking about what features they can put into the Wii Madden 07. They're not just dumping what they have to console X like they do for every other console. They're actually thinking about how to make the game better using the Wiimote.
Nintendo is extremely careful about load times. I mean, hell, they went with cartridges instead of CDs for the N64 because of load tims. Gamecube devkits have deliberately-limited transfer rates from the dev hard drive so that the devs need to deal with load times. I'm sure it won't be a big deal here.
Plus, it does have an internal Flash drive, although I think that's mostly for downloaded stuff.
I've upped my standards, so up yours.