Iwata asks

Nuke RedL

Kiwii
Dec 9, 2006
69
0
Te Awamutu
I have been reading through Mr Iwata's interviews("Iwata asks") with key members of the development team responsible for the Wii's creation . Follow the link below to these interviews .
http://wii.nintendo.com/iwataasks.jsp
The following is a heavily edited and condensed exert of the original text , so as to give an insight into these interviews and possibly raise points of discussion.
There are so-called Roadmaps (overviews of proposed technologies/products) . Looking again at the completed Wii, I feel that it has turned out to be something completely different from what was predicted in the mainstream technology Roadmaps.
This may sound paradoxical, but if we had followed the existing Roadmaps we would have aimed to make it “faster and flashier.” In other words, we would have tried to improve the speed at which it displays stunning graphics. But we could not help but ask ourselves, “How big an impact would that direction really have on our customers?” During development, we came to realise the sheer inefficiency of this path when we compared the hardships and costs of development against any new experiences that might be had by our customers.
After speaking with Nintendo's development partners, I became keenly aware of the fact that there is no end to the desire of those who just want more. Give them one, they ask for two. Give them two, and next time they will ask for five instead of three. Then they want ten, thirty, a hundred, their desire growing exponentially. Giving in to this will lead us nowhere in the end. I started to feel unsure about following that path about a year into development.
Nintendo doesn't develop semiconductors by itself, so I worked on developing them with our business partners.
At the risk of oversimplifying, I would say that the technologies that form the basis of all semiconductors are not that different from each other. On the other hand, how these fundamental technologies are applied depends on the device itself. Wii takes full advantage of state-of-the-art semiconductor technologies, but its application of them differs greatly from that of other devices. So, while the fact that we are using state-of-the-art semiconductor technology does not differ from my original expectations, the way in which we are using them has turned out to be very different.


Doesn't the text in blue sound like the other "next gen" consoles ?
Does "faster & flashier" translate into new experience ?
And doesn't the text in red just sound like the other "next gen" console's fanboys ?
The underlined text give hint to the motivations behind of the design of the WII's CPU .
 
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