N’Gai Croal intervista Shigeru Miyamoto

Bellissima intervista con il maestro realizzata da N’Gai Croal. La potete trovare qui. Ecco un estratto dell'intervista;
Level Up: There were a lot of Nintendo fans that were expecting–or hoping, rather–that something new would be announced during your talk at GDC. Instead, it was more of a look back, at how you got to where you are today as a designer. Why did you decide to make that the focus of your talk, rather than get into something new? Is it because of the secondary stock offering, or were there other reasons why you chose to look back?
Shigeru Miyamoto: Well it’s true that because of the secondary stock offering that we’re in a quiet period and can’t announce any new information right now, but that’s not the reason that I decided to do more of a look at how things have changed over the years. Part of the reason I gave the speech I did is that for the last seven years, we’ve talked a lot about the expanded user base, the problems with the game industry shrinking in Japan, the potential for that to happen here in the U.S., but it’s been a lot of talking about it on the surface and not really getting into the meat of the subject. We never really up until now had a sense of how to turn what we saw [as] the solutions to those problems into reality. We finally with the DS were able to achieve that and see the changes that we’ve been seeing in the market. This time, I really wanted to take the experiences I’ve had with the DS and the Wii and try to share some of the understanding that I’ve gained with others. We’ve talked about how videogames have been advancing as technology advances. We’ve questioned whether there was really a need for graphics to continue to improve the way they have and processors to continue to improve the way they have. But we didn’t really have any concrete examples of how you could forego those types of advances and still have a revolutionary new gameplay style. So I really felt that now that we had some concrete examples of some of these ideas that we’d been talking about, that it was a good time for me to talk to the developers themselves about some of the ideal ways that we see creators can interact with technology and find different ways to use technology to bring their ideas to fruition. But at the same time I wanted to clear up some misunderstandings that some developers have about what Nintendo is trying to do, and make it really clear that we’re not saying that you need to turn your back on technology. We’re not saying that the game industry is bad and that we don’t like what people are doing. I wanted to take this opportunity to explain what my vision has been as a designer and a developer, and share that with them to help them better understand the things that we’ve been saying by using some of these concrete examples and looking back at some of the things we’ve been doing over the past several years. One of the biggest points of my speech is that there was a time when Space Invaders and Super Mario came out when videogames were at the center of pop culture. It was huge news. Everybody knew what Space Invaders was. Everybody knew what Super Mario Bros was. The world used to react to games and respond to games in a way that I haven’t seen it doing in a long time. I wanted to try to convey the idea to people that the expanded audience isn’t just about reaching out to new people but in fact it’s about trying to get videogames back to a central position in pop culture and getting the world to pay attention to videogames again. Sorry for such a long answer. [Laughs.]