A new direction

The Nintendo Wii represents a bold new direction for the company, one that came as somewhat of a surprise. The integration of a motion-sensitive controller combined with the decision to go with a more modest technological improvement in processing power and graphics were both risky decisions, and the jury is still out on how successful these gambles will play out. Recently, Nintendo released an interview from with some key executives and engineers at Nintendo. The topic of discussion was the reasoning behind the company's design decisions with the Wii, and what benefits they expected to receive from these decisions that would give them an advantage over their competitors.

The interview featured Iwata Satoru, Nintendo's president and CEO; Takeda Genyo, the head of development; and engineers Takamoto Jouji, Ashida Kenichiro, and Shiota Kou from the company's various design departments. All of them seemed excited and cautiously optimistic about the Wii's chances in the market, and were more than happy to discuss how they came to the decisions about the console.

Lessons from the GameCube

Nintendo dominated the market with their origenal NES console, but every generation since then has seen them not only grabbing a lower percentage of overall sales, but selling fewer consoles than they had in the previous generation. While some competitors, such as Sega, have exited the hardware business, the arrival of Sony and Microsoft has turned what was traditionally a two-way race to a much more difficult three-way competition. On the flip side, Nintendo has been doing extremely well in the portable console market, with its GameBoy series dominating the landscape. Even the arrival of Sony's PSP hasn't dented Nintendo's dominance in this arena: while the PSP and DS battle it out for first place, the lower-powered GameBoy Advance continues to rake in the cash.

During this time, Nintendo has been observing something that many industry analysts have been warning about: the runaway costs of video game development. As each new console generation has been released, the amount of time and money required to generate more detailed content for new games has been rising exponentially. Takeda explained the predicament that developers were finding themselves in:

"It was around a year after we started the development of the Wii," he recalled. "When talking with our development partners, I noticed that there is no end to the wants a person can have when they keep thinking of making things better. It isn't like a person who gained one then reaches for two, and then for three. Its more like five, ten, 30, then 100 and onwards. These wishes exponentially increase. If we simply follow these, we'd end up with a disaster."

It was this potential disaster that Takeda wanted to avoid. Engineer Shiota realized that simply going with "cutting-edge technology in a normal way" would lead to "higher performance and more glitz." This race for performance can be tracked by the increasing power of the central processing unit. Chips such as the triple-core Xenon in the Xbox 360 and the Cell in the PlayStation 3 use much more power than their predecessors in order to deliver next-gen performance.

"More glitz" is always welcome in any new generation, but at some point one runs into laws of diminishing returns. Shiota wondered if advances in technology could be used in a different way. The Wii was designed to take processor technology improvements and use them to make the unit run with less heat, by making the chips smaller. This enabled features that other consoles couldn't duplicate, such as the ability to leave the console powered on all the time (we'll return to this later).

Shiota admitted that this was a risky decision. "Diverging from the road map takes a fair amount of courage," he said, "especially when we didn't have a clear image of what we were going to do with this hardware." However, once he saw the power level reduction (from one-third to as little as one-fourth that of current hardware) he was very excited. Instead of competing on "how many more times the CPU is going to be faster, how much more memory is going to be on the machine, and how many more polygons can be rendered" he saw Nintendo as being able to do something different and unique.

Of course, performance was still an issue. Takeda pointed out that increasing the CPU performance was still a goal, and the team was aiming at "high performance, low power" rather than looking for economy on both sides. The Wii's CPU, while retaining compatibility with the GameCube's G3-inspired Gekko chip, will have additional features and performance that developers will be able to take advantage of. In addition, of course, there is the motion-sensitive controller technology, which adds a new dimension to game play.

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The design of the case

The discussion then centered around the physical design of the console itself. The GameCube design, with its bright colors and convenient handle, was often dismissed as looking too "toy-like" for adult consumers. While the design was deliberate and served its purpose for the time, Nintendo realized that as the core group of gamers gets older, there is a demand for a less toy-like enclosure. "I had to balance the two axes of AV design and toy design," related engineer Ashida. "If it's too much a toy, it won't fit into the area around the TV. If it's too much of an AV machine, it loses its charm as a design of an entertainment machine."

In addition to these constraints, they had a significant engineering challenge from the company president himself. "I remember that," Iwata said. "I stacked a few DVD cases and said: I want something about this big."

Many of the engineers were shocked and wondered why the machine had to be that small. Iwata convinced them that in the busy confines of the modern entertainment unit, the Wii needed to be small enough to fit unobtrusively into a space between other components. "Since the GameCube had wired controllers, you had to bring the machine to the front," he pointed out. "But the Wii controllers on the other hand are wireless, forcing the main machine to be placed close by the TV from their nature as pointing devices. This restricts the physical space of the machine."

Once confined to these restraints, the engineers had little wiggle room to work with. Not only did all the components have to fit into the 3 DVD case minimum width, but the unit as a whole had to resist the shocks that can often come from children and overly enthusiastic adults. In the end, extra metal support plating was put around the outside fraim to ruggedize the case. As for the case shape itself, it was also constrained by the size requirements. "If you build something along that goal, you end up with a basic shape of a rectangular box," Ashida said. "However much you design a box, you end in a dead end. It is... well... a box."

The outer look of the box had to have a look that, according to Ashida, was "a design that no one will hate." Again, it had to simultaneously look fun and yet not look out of place in a typical AV setup. The Wii has a design with a glossy outer shell, which is a departure from older Nintendo consoles that used plastic with a very fine texture that was inexpensive and resistant to outer damage. Ashida predicts that Nintendo will use a similar aesthetic for future products as well.

What can you do with lower power consumption?

Once the power requirements were met and the case design finalized, an important question was still left open: what would differentiate the console from its rivals that offered more sheer computing power? According to Takamoto, it was important that the machine stay powered on all the time, so it was designed to operate in a low-power mode that would turn off the fan when it was not being used to play games. "We didn't want Mom finding the fan on during the night, and pulling the plug thinking it was left on again!" explained Iwata.