In 1978, I entered the Tokyo Institute of Technology. I would have loved to study videogame programming, but nobody was teaching it then. So I went to classes on engineering and early computer science.
In Europe, we packed in Wii Sports with the console, so one way or another, people processed the Wii by enjoying Wii Sports. The unique, interactive nature of the game was spread thanks to the excitement from the consumer.
Personally, I think that users should be able to use all the functions of a console video game machine as soon as they open the box.
Nintendo is a company of Kyoto craftsmen, and what we don't want to do is, if we know we can make something better, we don't want to leave that behind.
If we reduce the number of employees for better short-term financial results, employee morale will decrease. I sincerely doubt employees who fear that they may be laid off will be able to develop software titles that could impress people around the world.
It's not part of our culture to even think about outright purchasing a third-party developer.
I'm not interested in offering software for free of charge. That's because I myself am one of the game developers who, in the future, wants to make efforts so the value of the software will be appreciated by the consumers.
The thing that concerns me most is that, in the digital age, if we fail to make efforts to maintain the value of our content, there is the high possibility for the value to be greatly reduced, as the history of the music industry has shown.
The digital world is one that has sort of a unique characteristic, where it's a place in which it's very easy for the value of content to fall.
If we don't take an approach that looks holistically at the form a video-game platform should take in the future, then we're not able to sustain Nintendo 10 years down the road.
The DS was launched back in 2004, and sales of that machine hit a record in 2009 in the United States. That is totally different from the conventional sales pattern, in which game gear sales peak in the third year and take a downturn thereafter.
One thing about the entertainment industry - it's not something that people need to survive.
Here's a hypothesis I seriously believe: If there hadn't been a 'Pokemon' game, maybe the market for handheld game devices would have gone extinct.
On my business card, I am a corporate president. In my mind, I am a computer programmer. But in my heart, I am a gamer.
Nintendo's approach to our work is to greatly increase the population of gamers.
We want to create a kind of cycle where casual gamers are gradually growing up to become passionate players.
Some people will say Nintendo's games are for children. But our goal is to boost the population of gamers by making games for all ages.
We are trying to capture the widest possible audience all around the world. In other words, we are trying to capture the people who are even beyond the gaming population.
When we considered what to do with the graphics capability of the Wii, we put more attention and focus on the ability to create new experiences rather than the quality of the graphics.
The approach to make more gorgeous-looking graphics... to have the horsepower, to have much faster processing - they don't do anything to ask nongamers to play with a video game.
