PART TWO

Q: This has a little to do with your last answer, but when the N64 came out, the differences between it and the Super Famicom were immediately obvious. With Mario 64 you could fully explore a 3D world, but now going from N64 to Gamecube, how will you explain that to the kids?
M: As we showed yesterday, there's a huge number of merits, and we can't really imagine what kind of new games are possible. When the Super Famicom came out, it's not as if people were all of a sudden bored with the Famicom, or stopped playing it, but definitely when people moved to the Super Famicom or the N64, it was obviously a totally different experience. So, with the Gamecube, if you imagine the N64 as the Famicom, then this is the Super Famicom. Even more than that jump, the technology jump with Gamecube is probably more rapid. It's up to the software companies to decide how to use it, but that's the way you should think of it.

Q: Mr. Miyamoto, as a game creator, what sort of things do you want to do?
M: Um.., I'll quit doing PR after today.
Q: (laughs)
M: I'm really terrible at this, I tell you (laughs). Leave me alone and I just quit talking. But, hmm.. if people ever get bored of games, then that means the creators are getting bored of games. It's vital that the maker can't get bored of what he's making. And right now I definitely feel a good response from what I'm doing, with the game-style demos I presented yesterday. Someone told me "Your games're gonna be late if you make these", but everyone was having fun, and we're really looking forward to the future. Of, you know, yelling at the hardware people, or (laughs). People who didn't like things before, or who were always criticizing everything, they're all working happily on the machine now. So we're all happy, and I'm sure we'll make something cool.
Q: Sounds like PR's really on your case about the games. (laughs)
S: Yeah, we had a lot of arguments about this show. Of course, we agreed on a lot, too, we knew we had to release something for PR.
M: They said don't show anything that could give away any of our games. (laughs) We haven't shown any screens of what I'm doing as the main project now.
S: Right. We wondered if we should have, but then the ideas might get stolen, so. Especially, between the time we announced N64 in November 1995 and when it came out in June 1996, there was a lot of things we saw we weren't very happy with; a lot of our ideas were imitated. Beyond the Rumble Pak, there was the analog stick that got released a day before ours was. It's too easy to steal those kinds of ideas. It's kind of a delicate task, so we hope you understand.
M: There isn't anything? Oh, I guess I better shut up about software then (laughs).

Q: I was wondering about selling points. In yesterday's presentation, the emphasis was definitely placed on "game machine" rather than "appliance", but, for example, if you saw it in an electronics appliance store you might be caught in by the design because it looks new and refined. Were you thinking of increasing the places where it could be sold in comparison to N64? Also, switching gears, back before there was a time when it looked like you would use DVD technology, but is the 8cm disk proprietary technology?
S: About selling, I'm afraid I have nothing really to comment on there. It's certainly a possible scenario, but as far as sales go we plan to go the same route we have before. As opposed to fanning our sales out, we're definitely also thinking along the lines of e-commerce, too. Since we own a 3 percent stake in Lawson [a chain of convenience stores], we've realized that convenience stores are good for distribution and getting products out, so we will continue along those lines. Beyond that, we're not especially dealing with appliance makers or distributors. Of course, we are receiving a lot of technological help from Matsushita now, and as for the media, we don't know about Matsushita until they make their announcement, but their plan for the Matsushita-version Dolphin was to make it compatible with Nintendo's games, and also to be able to play Hollywood movies. So that goes beyond mere electronic appliances there. As for the disk, if you really want to make the best game system possible, you first have to brainstorm about it. So starting with Miyamoto everyone was discussing this. Miyamoto touched on this yesterday, but the idea of just being able to carry it around the house easily, or not skipping if it's kicked or whatever, it's important to come up with those ideas first. And when we wondered if a full-size disk was necessary; Miyamoto and others discussed it during development, and we thought that that wasn't the road we should take. We can put 190 Super Mario 64s on what we have here, so right now the need to surpass that isn't there. Even if it is, then oh well, we'll make it a two-disk game. That was the conclusion. Another very important point is about why we joined with Matsushita on this, and that was mainly for copyrights and copy protection. I'm no technician in the field of security, but after Takeda and others discussed copy protection they decided it'd be best to call on Matsushita for it. And the 8cm disks make it even easier to avoid simple copying right off the bat. Even if the protection did get cracked, it'll be impossible to release copies in high volume, like you can with CD-R copiers now to copy PlayStation software. That's definitely beginning to destroy the European market. So upon thinking of that, 8cm disks were definitely the overall way to go. If Miyamoto decided to make something, then the software...
M: Well, copy protection is a very deep problem, so it's a proprietary format on a proprietary disk. DVD-Rs will probably be standard issue in a few years, after all. I wanted to put the disc in a case or something, but we kept it by itself to ensure compatibility with Matsushita's machine. We'll worry about that later.

Q: Are you worried about the lack of space on the disks?
S: Not really that, but recent games...
M: It's not like 8cm disks are a negative thing. The 8cm question (laughs); people were always asking why it's not a regular 12cm disk, it's making me nervous (laughs).

Q: When I went back to my editor to report on it, he was like "So we can't play music CDs?" and so on. We had a discussion about it, but we were wondering about the necessity of the 8cm disks...
M: If you could view movies then you wouldn't play the games.
Q: (laughs)
M: You don't have to write that. (laughs)
Q: (laughs)
M: I didn't mean anything major by that. You know, if people buy the games without copying them, then the makers can keep on going, and so on. Media's media, but what's important is the software inside it, and the software doesn't really care about the media. We helped save the earth's resources that little bit by taking centimeters off each disk, no? (laughs)

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