Interview with the 'Godfather' Miyamoto
Shigeru Miyamoto chats with WHAM!
By Steve Tilley
Miyamoto struts his stuff while sporting some Link-garb.
Nintendo has a history of springing a big surprise on the unsuspecting media and industry types at each year’s E3 press briefing, a jam-packed affair held the day before the show opens to the teeming masses at the Los Angeles Convention Centre.
Sometimes the announcement lands with a thud, like last year¹s unveiling of Namco and Nintendo’s lame-o Pac-Man game. But more often than not the Big N gets the fan faithful gasping with an unexpected shocker. And this year was definitely no exception.
While the crowd was duly impressed with the upcoming dual-screened handheld, the Nintendo DS, when legendary game guru Shigeru Miyamoto leapt onto the stage wielding a prop sword and shield to announce a new Zelda game for the GameCube featuring an older, more realistic-looking Link well, everyone went Donkey Kong-sized bananas.
With the help of veteran Nintendo translator Bill Trinen, we had a chance to sit down with Miyamoto away from the cacophony of the E3 show floor to talk about the new look of Link and discuss the future of the Nintendo DS. Here are the highlights from that chat.
Wham! Gaming: Are you moving to this more realistic version of Link because it¹s what people wanted, or did you have it mind all along?
Shigeru Miyamoto: Maybe it’s a little bit of both (laughs). When we did Ocarina of Time, obviously that was a game where you started off as a child and matured into an adult. But earlier on when we were developing the game, we started off developing it around an adult Link, and because of that we chose the graphical style we did with Ocarina of Time. Whereas with Wind Waker, we knew from the get-go that it was going to be entirely a story about Link as a young boy, and with that in mind we thought about the best way to express the story of a young boy, and how we could best create a reality in this world of Zelda using a graphical style. And the decision was that by going with this ‘toon-shading’ style, we can better express a young boy and better show his movements and make a more cohesive, realistic-feeling world.
But at that time, obviously, we still had questions about if we’ve gone with this decision because Link’s a boy, what do we do the next time when we decide to make a game when Link is more grown up, and how are we going to create Link in a cel-shaded style as an adult. After a lot of discussion, what we decided was the best graphical presentation for an adult link was this style.
Wham!: Can you give us some examples of how this adventure will be more adult and more mature?
SM: Link as a character will be taller with longer limbs, so we’re going to have a lot more sword fighting and action elements like we saw in a game like Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. And then of course we’ll have to have a lot of cool items that we can have Link using in different poses.
(At this point, Miyamoto showed a five-minute extended trailer for the upcoming game, featuring Link battling foes on horseback, squaring off against fearsome monsters and engaging in your basic acts of derring-do. Miyamoto assured us the mind-blowing visuals were generated entirely in-game, with only the camera angles altered.)
Wham!: Very, very nice. Some of those monsters look pretty fierce, is the game going to be darker or scarier than the last game?
SM: I don’t necessarily think so. We haven’t finished the game completely, but kind of like we did with Ocarina of Time, we really want to create the feeling that the player is in the real world of Hyrule the vast expanse and open spaces, and the feelings of going to very unique places ¬we’ve spent a lot of time focusing on that. But I don’t think we’ll make it overtly dark.
Wham!: Regarding the Nintendo DS, it looks as though it really will create new forms of gameplay, with the two screens and touch sensitivity and voice recognition. Are developers rising to the challenge of incorporating these elements into gameplay?
SM: Yes, developers are really excited about it and very interested in developing for it. The best example is Pac-Pix, the game Namco has created. It’s something they’ve been thinking of for a long time internally, and they’ve never had a hardware system where they’ve been able to create it. And so as soon as we showed them the DS, they immediately jumped on board and said, “Oh, we’ve got a great idea for that.”
Wham!: Do you think Sony’s new handheld and the DS are aimed at different audiences? Or do you think they’ll compete head to head?
SM: The same could be said for our game development, but I don’t really like looking at it in terms of competing with somebody else to create something. I like to think of it in terms of we always want to try to create things no one else is creating. But because we’re going for the same consumer wallet that they are, I guess in that sense there is a competitive tone to it. If you look at the PSP, that’s a hardware system where you can take the kinds of games and the type of gameplay that we’ve seen so far on other systems, maybe technologically expand them a little bit and put them on a handheld system. Whereas the DS is something completely different. With the DS you can create new styles of gameplay that we’ve never seen on the GameBoy, or never seen on a home game system. And I think for that reason there will be a very, very big difference between the two systems.
Wham!: So the DS has shown that Nintendo really can create new styles of gameplay when you set out to do it. You’ve made the same promise for the successor to the GameCube, generally speaking, what kind of new gameplay can you address with the home console that we haven’t seen before?
SM: It’s kind of hard for me to give you a hint right now, but one thing I think is kind of interesting about the entertainment industry is we’ll be able to, after introducing the DS, look at how people respond to it and how people accept it, and based on that we’ll be able to implement different ideas going forward on new hardware generations. So I think that’s very exciting, and we're very much looking forward to seeing how people respond to the DS.
Wham!: Is the DS meant to be a successor to the GameBoy, or is there going to be another GameBoy?
SM: I think we’ll continue to see the GameBoy series develop and see the GameBoy develop going forward, maybe into something that’s more compact, more affordable and very playable. Whereas with the DS, although it’s a portable system, we could have done something similar with a system you could put on a desktop, but it’s turned out to be something even more portable. So you’ll definitely see the two systems co-exist going forward.
Thanks very much Miyamoto-san!
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. Eergisteren een dik uur prive en ver van de meute met de Nintendo DS gespeelt 
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). Uitleg is in het Japans dus daar word ik ook niet wijzer van 
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Maarja, ik vond hem over het algemeen wel vermakelijk, zeker geen topper, maar goed te doen (zeker als je 6 weken thuiszit ivm een operatie).
Dit topic is gesloten.