May 28th, 2002 (12:00am) - The 2002 E3 show has been the biggest in Nintendo’s history, and top visionaries Satoru Iwata and Shigeru Miyamoto sat down with Nintendo Power to give us the scoop on some of the biggest developments, including an exclusive look the upcoming Legend of Zelda game for Nintendo GameCube, as well as what we’ll be seeing at next year’s E3!
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NP: With Nintendo’s huge showing at E3, the biggest ever with its Game Giants and Connectivity presentation, you have to be thinking what next year’s E3 will be like. How are you going to top an E3 presentation that’s this enormous?
Miyamoto: Next year, our big focus is going to be on uniqueness and innovation.
Iwata: We thought that for our second year [with Nintendo GameCube and Game Boy Advance] that it was really important to focus on our strengths. And that’s why we see this really historical presence of Nintendo franchises at this year’s show. And I think that it’d be difficult to repeat in the future. We’ve never seen a lineup like this. But at the same time it’s extremely important for us to continue to put out new products and new ideas and new franchises. Because, if we don’t, there’s really no future for us. And so that’s going to be our main focus going forward.
NP: And by "uniqueness," does that mean we’re going to see more connectivity, with an even stronger presence of connective games at next year’s E3?
Miyamoto: Yes. I think that definitely means more connectivity, but it also means more games that are in and of themselves unique. Unique ideas--of course, half of that is still all in my head.
Iwata: Connectivity is one of our strengths, but it’s not the only thing that bring uniqueness to our games. And so we’re really looking forward to making games themselves unique. Next year we may see something more like last year--when we brought out Pikmin, which was something totally new and never before seen. And it surprised a lot of people. That’s really the kind of surprise that Mr. Miyamoto is looking for. And so the kinds of things we’ll be showing next year may have some characters that people are familiar with but are completely new games. There might also be games that have characters that are themselves completely new. Mr. Miyamoto is thinking about a lot of different things. There will be a lot to look forward to.
NP: Mr. Miyamoto, you’d said that playing The Legend of Zelda for the Nintendo GameCube is like "playing a cartoon." Other recent games have attempted this, but with varying degrees of success. Yours is undoubtedly the first smash success. What’s the secret of Zelda playing like a cartoon?
Miyamoto: [Laughs.] It’s because we have such talented people!
NP: Even certain games that are based on existing cartoons have only partially recreated the cartoon experience. What do you think are the real challenges of making a game play like a cartoon?
Miyamoto: I think a really large goal was to find a kind of expression that really fit the Zelda world--to create his own universe. In doing so, we came up with many ideas and went with the cartoon-style of cel-shading that we now have. But from early on, the designers were able to look at that style of cel-shading and understand what elements of that really fit the Zelda world and helped to draw out the characters in the world.
From all over E3, we can see that cel shading is a kind of trend in game technology, and there are many games that are trying it. But, in Zelda, we’re not just taking this technological trend and applying it to the game. We’re really taking the idea of it being a cartoon and creating the entire world as a cartoon--rather than just applying a graphic technique to an already-created world.
So we’re using cartoon-style expression on Link’s face and cartoon-styled expression in the emotions and animations of other characters as well. The whole world feels like a cartoon, rather than just using this cartoon technology and applying it to a medium.
NP: On the E3 demo of The Legend of Zelda for the Nintendo GameCube, the boss fight with the lava monster is as thrilling as the big finales from the very best feature-length cartoons. What has the power of the GCN enabled you to do with Zelda-style boss fights?
Miyamoto: To put it simply, in games you have a lot of elements. Graphic effects, flame, smoke, particle effects--things like that. And you have the processing and computation needed to create the monster’s animations and movements. You also have the sound, using Dolby Pro-Logic II Surround Sound, which plays an important role. Taking all of those into consideration, the Nintendo GameCube is an extremely well-balanced piece of hardware. The overall ability to handle all these different effects is very good--and makes the complete effect very strong.
On top of that, we have our own basic ability to come up with these very easy-to-control camera systems and finding interfaces, items and designs that are really suited to the world. So I think it’s really a culmination of a lot of these elements that have allowed us to do this with the Nintendo GameCube.
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This was just an excerpt from the July issue of Nintendo Power so if you want to read the whole thing I suggest buying the magazine or you could just wait for it to hit the internet.
