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

Power to the Wii

[GORby_]

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?

Re:Power to the Wii

[Aladrin]

Yeah, I'm afraid next-gen does indeed have more to do with graphics and processing power than anything else. In a sane world, creating a new (?) interface for gaming would be easily classed as 'next gen' because it evolved. Of course it isn't truly new, as motion sensing has been done before. Just not from the ground up.

Nintendo's 'next gen' consoles and handhelds do indeed seem to lack when compared to their competition, but they really -are- fun. And that's what gaming was supposed to be about. These days, gaming seems to be more about entertainment (IE: lack of boredom) than fun. Nintendo still tries for fun.

Not that I don't enjoy my x360 and psp. They've got some great games. But most of them are more about staving off boredom during my free hours than actively enjoying the experience.

My examples: Test Drive Unlimited. I hate driving, and yet I play this game... I've actually driven over 200 miles in game, and yes, that took as long as it does in real life. (Well, at 100+ MPH.) Why? I don't freaking know. But I enjoyed it, oddly enough.

And Okami. About half of this game you wander around feeding animals and drawing flowers. Why do I do it? I dunno. But it's entertaining. (Lord knows it isn't the regular battles that I play it for. -yawn-)

But the DS has games like Trauma Center (it was fun up until 2-4, which was ridiculously hard and I quit.)

What's the difference? I think it's the amount of involvement. With Trauma Center, you are really there, cutting things out and stitching it back up. You don't just press a button and jiggle an analog stick. You actually draw the lines for the sutures and cuts.

I'm hoping the Wii continues this and games like Elebits are actively fun to play and experience, instead of just sitting back and pushing buttons.

Re:Power to the Wii

[XxtraLarGe]

IMHO, gameplay always trumps graphics. Case in point, Civ 2 vs. Civ 3. (possibly Civ 4). To be honest, none of the Next-Gen consoles offer anything compelling enough to make me want to buy them, at least not at the current price point. I don't have a HD television, and I don't have tons of money to spend on games. If somebody asked me what they should buy for a game console today, I'd tell them PS2. You're getting a console that plays DVD's and has a huge collection of great games for $20, and free online play. If I had to pick a Next-Gen console though, it would be the Wii based on price point and game selection.

Power Consumption

[Iwanowitch]

it was important that the machine stay powered on all the time, so it was designed to operate in a low-power mode that would turn off the fan when it was not being used to play games.

I always wondered... If this thing is going to be plugged in always, and running always, doesn't it consume enormous amounts of power? I've often hear people say that it's better to unplug your tv, stereo, ... when not in use for 'longer periods' (say, the night) because even the smallest of control lights still uses power for no gain. Anyone who has ever done some tests with those power consumption meters? Anyone planning to do it for the Wii?

Re:Power Consumption

[chrismcdirty]

I'm by far no expert, but I believe the reason people say it's better to unplug everything is the miniscule power drain from being plugged in. It won't cost you more than a few dollars a year. But when the entire world is leaving devices plugged in, it ends up being a huge amount of power devoted to doing nothing.

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

[Wdomburg]

If this thing is going to be plugged in always, and running always, doesn't it consume enormous amounts of power?

The article states the power consumption is "from one-third to as little as one-fourth that of current hardware". Since the Gamecube drew only about 20W, that comes to 5-7W. That would make a full days consumption about the same as having an XBox 360 on for an hour. A years worth of power, assuming 0.14/kWh comes to a whopping $8.58. And that's assuming it draws full power the entire time. They have a power button which presumably drops consumption further. My guesss is it powers down the video chip, bluetooth, usb ports, and possibly clocks down the CPU.

Re:Power Consumption

[gEvil (beta)]

But when the entire world is leaving devices plugged in, it ends up being a huge amount of power devoted to doing nothing.

Not true! How else will I know that it's eternally twelve o'clock in my apartment?

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.

Re:Space constraints

[jimstapleton]

I lot of entertainment centers I've seen have quite a bit of space left over on the side with various players. More than enough for a vertical Wii - probably designed for things with side vents, which none of my VCR/Stereo/DVD players have.

Interesting decisions...

[mgblst]

for Nintendo. They opted away from the childish design of the gamecube, for something more sleek. I can't see this as a bad thing.

Always on, could be good too, but could backfire in our green world.

But a weak CPU, I am pretty sure that developers will always push for a better CPU. One of the ways of measuring a console is to compare those games that run on all three - and this could make the Nintendo look bad, very bad. Risky.

Re:Interesting decisions...

[chrismcdirty]

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. Part of Nintendo's strategy is to reduce the amount of money it takes to make new games by reducing the importance of the high-cost items (CPU, GPU, HDD). And from what I hear, the DevKit is very similar to the GCN, since the architecture is merely an upgrade, as opposed to a total overhaul, so developers should be familiar with developing on it. I have extremely high hopes for what Capcom will do with the new Resident Evil game.

And the CPU is technically better. It's (supposedly) 1.5x more powerful than the GCN processor, and some degree better than the original Xbox.

Re:Interesting decisions...

[hal2814]

"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.

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.

Old News

[Nalgas D. Lemur]

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.

Re:Looks Good

[The Warlock]

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.