Miyamoto on VR, making hardware unique/affordable, why Wii U isn't a hit, mobile plans and how he got hired

A portion of an NPR interview with Shigeru Miyamoto...

NPR: At this conference, there's a lot of virtual reality. Have you seen virtual reality? What do you think of it?

SM: Yes, I've seen virtual reality, and we experiment with virtual reality and different technologies. We're quite interested in it, but at the same time, Nintendo's philosophy is that we create products that are going to be played with everyone in the living room. And we don't feel that virtual reality is a good fit for that philosophy. And so, while I can't say whether there will be a technology in the future that's a virtual-reality-type experience that fits with that or not, we're here at this conference to showcase the products that we're going to be selling in the next year or so. We don't have anything in the near future that fits that, and so that's why we're not showing anything in the virtual reality space this year.

NPR: One of the things about Nintendo that's always been interesting is you've never tried to make a more powerful console with better graphics, and all the stuff that the Xbox has done. Can you explain a little why you've kind of stuck with that?

SM: So unfortunately with our latest system, the Wii U, the price point was one that ended up getting a little higher than we wanted. But what we are always striving to do is to find a way to take novel technology that we can take and offer it to people at a price that everybody can afford. And in addition to that, rather than going after the high-end tech spec race and trying to create the most powerful console, really what we want to do is try to find a console that has the best balance of features with the best interface that anyone can use.

And the reason for that is that, No. 1, we like to do things that are unique and different from other companies, but we also don't want to just end up in a race to have the highest-tech specs in a competition to try to find how we get these expensive tech specs to the lowest price of the other systems. And so there's different ways that we can approach it, and sometimes we look at it just from the sense of offering a system that consumes less power and makes less noise and generates less heat, or sometimes we may look at the size of the media and the size of the system and where it fits within the home.

But really what's most important to us is, how do we create a system that is both unique and affordable so that everyone can afford it and everyone can enjoy it.

NPR: The first Wii sold really well; the Wii U, not so much. Do you think part of it is the price that the Wii has not sold so well?

SM: So I don't think it's just price, because if the system is appealing enough, people will buy it even if the price is a little bit high. I think with Wii U, our challenge was that perhaps people didn't understand the system. But also I think that we had a system that's very unique — and, particularly with video game systems, typically it takes the game system a while to boot up. And we thought that with a tablet-type functionality connected to the system, you could have the rapid boot-up of tablet-type functionality, you could have the convenience of having that touch control with you there on the couch while you're playing on a device that's connected to the TV, and it would be a very unique system that could introduce some unique styles of play.

I think unfortunately what ended up happening was that tablets themselves appeared in the marketplace and evolved very, very rapidly, and unfortunately the Wii system launched at a time where the uniqueness of those features were perhaps not as strong as they were when we had first begun developing them. So what I think is unique about Nintendo is we're constantly trying to do unique and different things. Sometimes they work, and sometimes they're not as big of a hit as we would like to hope. After Wii U, we're hoping that next time it will be a very big hit.

So this with Super Mario Maker and being able to design levels on the touchscreen in your hand while watching on the big screen, and with games like Star Fox Zero where the big screen represents sort of a movie-like experience, but with the gamepad and the gamepad screen in your hands, you're able to play a video game simultaneously with the excitement of these cinematic scenes happening on the TV. And I think that's going to give people a lot of excitement, and I'm hoping that people will be looking forward to playing those games on Wii U in the fall.

NPR: Did I hear correctly that now some of the Nintendo characters will move to other devices?

SM: It's not exactly that. Really what we're thinking about is, outside of Nintendo hardware, there's other media where there are opportunities for people to come in contact with Nintendo characters and Nintendo properties. So we're looking at how we can leverage those other types of media like mobile to help people encounter our characters and to develop that relationship. But what we're not going to be doing is taking the same games that are playable on our devices and making those games playable on mobile devices.

NPR: I read that when you first came and were hired by Nintendo, they didn't think much of you at the time. You were a young kid, right out of college, and that it was kind of like, "what do I do with this kid?" Is that true? Can you tell the story of how you ended up there?

SM: Forget that story because that's not the right one. I wanted to create things that would surprise people, so I thought that I had wanted to make toys. And so I applied to Nintendo wanting to be a designer, but what I was told is that they weren't hiring any designers at the time.

Fortunately a friend of my father's knew the president of Nintendo, Mr. [Hiroshi] Yamauchi, so my dad's friend said, "I'll at least try to get you an interview."

So I gathered together my portfolio of things that I had made and went to my interview. Mr. Yamauchi saw the things I had made and brought with me, and he seemed to like them and he seemed to like me, and so they decided to hire me, and I became the first industrial designer in Nintendo. And at the time, I think they had only three graphic designers even.

And I think the one story that may be surprising is, one of the things I had brought and shown to Mr. Yamauchi, I found out later he had submitted a patent on without me realizing it. So that's how I know that the story that you said is maybe not true. It's funny, isn't it? I found that out about three years after I joined the company. The head of our general affairs and our IP team in Japan knew me from the moment I joined the company, and I had always wondered, how did he know who I was even though I had just joined the company?