PART THREE

Q: Once the disc-media announcement was made, Mr. Miyamoto, you said that once ROM cartridges go away you'll probably get annoyed once you run into problems with load time How has that been shaping up?
M: That's still there, definitely. But we've found ways to get rid of it. And, sure, I'm still worried about it, but more than that, I've always been worried about how much RAM is in the system more than anything else. How much you can load in at one time. Now that the Gamecube is on disc media, we'll be able to do that much more with the space. So now we're building up know-how with regards to load speed, so I'm sure it'll turn out all right.

Q: I wanted to ask about the system, but the MPU [Gekko], does it control both the main and graphic sections of the systems? Is that the right way to think about it?
M: I'll turn this one over to PR.
S: Well, sorry, I haven't prepared about that. (laughs)
M: Hold on a second. Do you have the concept book?
S: Yes.
M: OK, while he's studying... (laughs)

Q: You mentioned that the Gamecube is similar to the FC/SFC evolution, so what do you think the next new game system, that will storm the world the way the Famicom did, be like? Also, I was wondering how much you think about character business and licensing during the creation of games.

M: Mmm, that's a good question. We tried creating quite a lot of different things with the N64, but as far as power went, there were limits, as I said yesterday. There are naturally bottlenecks in any hardware, so I think we did well with those. We made the N64 ourselves, after all. So, even when we tried to give it all on the new games we were making, there were... the limitations that were there are all gone now, so now as I said before it's now up to the software people to work on it, and it's up to me to try my best to work on it. That's how I've felt on everything since the Super Famicom. I want the Gamecube to be something people want to bring into their homes. As for the character business, it's been going on forever, but thanks to the brutal popularity of Pokemon, the importance of media mixing, or on the other hand the fact that there's a bubble in relying on character licensing for profit for too long, is well known. I don't want to get on that bubble, of course. The first and foremost thing we are, are creators of interactive, fun things, and we'll be doing just that on the Gamecube and on the mobile machines. In order to do that, if Mario is good for it we'll use Mario, if Pokemon are good for it we'll use them, and we'll create new characters if necessary. And that naturally has potential to it, so it might become the next business, that sort of thing. It's definitely not as if the game business is a far-away part of the character business in this marketplace.

Q: Do you have the answer from before?
M: The spokesman will have that. It might be better to verify it with Takeda.
Q: Sorry. There's one more thing I want to confirm with Takeda. I know the main memory is 24MB, but I was wondering what the A memory was.
M: (laughs) Think of it as something really awesome.
Q: I was wondering about that from before.
M: Well, it doesn't really matter yet, does it?
Q: (laughs)
M: It might be better for us not to lay out the big numbers and details right now anyway. As far as the current announcement goes, it'd be great if you just remember that we can move 128 Marios around.
Q: All right.

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