Q: That actually leads me into my next question about the Revolution, specifically about the new controller which was unveiled recently. How much of a risk do you think Nintendo is taking with this new controller design? Do you think that the gaming public — as well as the wider public that you might be trying to attract, to branch out to — do you think that they’re ready for this new approach to gaming?To be honest, I’m just truly confident in our plan. Obviously, we’ve been talking a lot about the new interface, the new functionality of the Revolution controller and the new types of game play it’s going to offer, but although we’ve mentioned it, we haven’t really talked too much about how it does have an expansion slot on the bottom of the controller. And what that expansion slot allows for are controller expansions.
From our perspective the Revolution controller is the new controller, everything else is now the classic controller. And with this expansion, you’ll be able to have a classic controller that expands the functionality of the core unit. And to be honest, we’ve already—
Q: It’ll have that more traditional form factor?
Exactly. We’ve got something that would be very similar in style and form to the Wave Bird already complete. What that allows us to do is that we have all of these new features. We have the new functionality of the Wave Bird controller and we have new ways that players will be able to interact with games. But at the same time, we’ve retained all the functionality of the classic-style controller, so that people who are familiar with games and familiar with that style of game play are going to be able to have the types of experiences that they’re expecting, on top of all of these new experiences that they’ve never imagined before. And so in that sense, to be honest, I think it’s a spectacular plan and we’re very confident. Obviously we’ve doing a lot of experiments with interfaces over the years and we think that that experience has really taken us in a direction that’s going to be very successful for us.
All that’s left for us is to take a look at the software to support the controller. Personally, I feel that first-person shooters are really well-suited for this controller. I’ve worked on them in the past in the Metroid Prime Series. And to be honest, I felt that first-person shooter controls on a classic controller were kind of clunky. They didn’t feel very—they didn’t feel very right. Whereas with this controller, with the nunchuck-style of controller it’s extremely natural and extremely intuitive. First-person shooters are a genre that are very popular in the United States, and I think that when gamers get their hands on this controller and start playing first-person shooters with it they’re going to find it’s probably the best way to play that kind of game.
Q: Do you think that most of the games that will be available on launch will actually take full advantage of the new controller? Or do you think it’s something that will have to evolve over time?
Well, as we’ve seen with the Nintendo DS it’s taken us about six months for games like Nintendogs and the Brain Training games we’ve introduced in Japan to came out, and these are software that can only be achieved on a Nintendo DS. So in that sense, it took us a little while to get full functionality out of the DS. But for the Revolution launch we’re trying to have software that takes as much advantage of the Revolution controller as possible. The one advantage we have in this area is that the Revolution development can actually be done on the Game Cube development environment. So the development kits are going to have a very similar structure to the Game Cube development kits, which makes it very easy for people who have started projects on the Game Cube development kids to just switch over the interface and continue working and have those games ready for the Revolution. We’re thinking that we’re going to be able to have a pretty strong launch.
October 3rd, 2005 (5:24pm) - Wondering about the Revolution controller? Need just a little bit more info? Engadget sat down with Shigeru Miyamoto of Nintendo and dicussed a few things, and the controller was one of them. While the entire interview is available at their site (linked below), here is an excerpt.
