Miyamoto Shrine: Shigeru Miyamoto's Home on The Web

Sugino: I must apologize to Mr. Miyamoto, but I do not feel any kind of pressure. Nintendo has a very strong family atmosphere. So, I go to him quite a bit. I speak with him frequently. So if I need something, I go right up to his desk and talk to him. I understand how people feel about Mr. Miyamoto; but to me, he's just a guy whom I work with every day.

For me, I do not feel that kind of pressure meeting Mr. Miyamoto's needs. For me, as a hardware designer, it is advantageous to have Mr. Miyamoto as almost a consultant in the work that we do. We can go to him and have these discussions. It's really a great environment for us.

GameSpy: With the tech demos you have now, it seems like the touch screen is more a source of innovation than the two screens.

Sugino: Adding touch-panel control really adds a new feel to video gaming, but then you have the challenge of the pen you are using blocking your view of the screen. That is why I believe that two screens is a great layout. You can use the stylus down below and still have view of what is going on in the game.

GameSpy: So are you satisfied with the uses that you have seen of your system so far?

Sugino: When I saw the variety of games that we were able to show I was really surprised because there was a wider variety than I expected there would be available so early. Because we have been able to deliver such a wide variety in such a short time … that says to me that we can really look forward to some great games a little ways down the road.

Miyamoto: When we look at creating peripherals for our hardware systems, the Research and Development teams always come back to us and say, 'We have this idea for a camera or a tilt sensor…' And I wonder, 'How much are we really going to use this? How many games are going to take advantage of this?' Obviously, the R&D teams are very busy creating games.

To devote time to some new peripheral … obviously the teams are not very pleased if we only use it for one or two games. In this case, with the touch sensor, when we came up with the idea, they were in doubt asking how much it was going to get used and how we were going to take advantage of it in our games.

To come to the show and see so many games taking advantage of touch control is really a good sign about what is yet to come.

GameSpy: Are you nervous about games like that Sonic game wearing out the screen too quickly?

Sugino: We will make a system that can stand up to that kind of abuse.

Miyamoto: When I saw that, I said to Mr. Naka, 'Maybe we need to come up with some guidelines.'

Sugino: When I first saw it I was a little nervous; but because we saw it at such an early stage, we now realize that there will be this kind of game for the DS and we are able to go work on it so that there will not be any trouble.

Sugino: I really like the submarine game. In fact, I am really kind of addicted to that game.

Because the DS was so secret, we have not been shown a lot of software outside of the development groups. Coming to E3, we have been here for five days now setting everything up. Any time that the set crew had any time off, we would always end up going up stairs to the submarine game and playing it. We kept getting better at it until now it is sort of this big high-score race.

Miyamoto: The people who are best at it are the ones who are doing the least amount of work.

Sugino: The EAD staff are very hard to catch up to. They are very good at it. I have gotten very good at it, too. So after them, it may be me.

GameSpy: I know what the answer is going to be, but I might as well ask. Have you started work on your next hardware system?

Sugino: Rather than finish one hardware system and move on to the next one, we are always in the process of developing new ideas and technologies. Take, for example, the DS. We have been working on the touch-panel technology idea for a long while. We have been working on the wireless connectivity on a separate research and development track.

What we do while we work on these different technologies is we try to figure out which ones we can apply to different video-game systems or how we can incorporate them into a hand-held system. We look for ways that will not only expand the system, but also expand the software and make that better.

Instead of it being a more staged set from one machine to the next, it's an amalgam of several research and development tracks going on. We evaluate what we can pull from our research and how best to match that into a new hardware system.

GameSpy: Have you ever finished a system or a prototype that you thought was good but never released?

Sugino: You might be a bit confused about the way that we design hardware. We never have a plan for designing a specific hardware system. We don't create prototypes, evaluate them, then decide whether or not to launch.

To put it in a better perspective, look at the Game Boy SP. With the SP, we basically added rechargeable batteries and front lighting to the AGB. Obviously, rechargeable battery technology had been around for a while. We had been researching it. The front-light technology had been around and we researched that.

So, in terms of how you bring those into new hardware, it's all about timing. It's timing to see when it's [the innovations] right for the hardware in terms of balances such as power consumption. This was something that Yokoi-san was very attentive to -- the needs of the consumer, the needs of the hardware, the needs of the developer, and balancing them together to create the right hardware.

So, in that sense, we have all of this research and development work going on, and we look for the right timing in terms of bringing these elements together into a new hardware system.

GameSpy: Did you work under Yokoi-san? (The late Gumpei Yokoi, dean of Nintendo's engineering efforts and creator of Game Boy.)

Sugino: Yes, from the time that I first joined Nintendo to the time that Mr. Yokoi left I worked under him. I worked as a hardware designer under Mr. Yokoi on projects like Game Boy Pocket and Virtual Boy.

GameSpy: When did you start?

Sugino: 1989.

GameSpy: Yokoi, along with creating hardware, developed some fine software. Did you work on software as well?

Sugino: Yes. For the four years after I joined Nintendo, I worked on software. The first game I worked on was Balloon Kids, which was a Game Boy version of Balloon Fight. I worked on the first Wario Land game, and I was involved with Fire Emblem.

In terms of actual game design, Wario Land was one of the games where I worked in more of a game design capacity. Rather than saying I was a game designer, I would say I was involved in more of the game creation work.

GameSpy: You actually remind me a little of Mr. Yokoi. (This should come as no surprise. Yokoi was so admired by the engineers he worked with that they were said to imitate the way he worked in the lab, addressed problems, and even the way that he dressed.)

Sugino: Thank you very much. I actually visit Mr. Yokoi's grave every once in a while. Next time I go, I will be sure to let him know that you have said that.

Miyamoto: I did not know that you visited Mr. Yokoi.

GameSpy: If you could add a single feature to a console or handheld game, what would that single ideal feature be?

Sugino: By introducing so many new features and innovations on the DS, we have created a system that takes new players and expert gamers and takes them all back to the starting line. In that sense, I hope that many non-gamers will look at DS and say, 'Oh, that looks like a video-game system that even I can play.'

How many more people can we bring into the gaming pool with DS? I think that the response to the DS is going to impact the future of our home gaming console and what that is going to be like. In that sense, rather than worry about how the DS may potentially be linked to the next system, I think there may be other developments beyond that that we may get to see.

GameSpy: But how about new features? If there was one feature you could add, what would it be?

Sugino: In our booth we are showing off a lot of titles that show the many directions in which the DS may go in terms of the balloon trip game, and Mario, and Metroid … Metroid in particular with its new styles of control. I think they all have good ideas that can be expanded upon.

I think the best example has to be Wario Ware. I think that it is a game that anybody can pick up and they will go have the same experience.

GameSpy: Will the next new Mario adventure be for DS, GameCube, or for a new console?

Miyamoto: It may end up on DS. You have seen Mario 64 x 4 here, but there is another Mario game that we are working on for the DS that is best suited for that system. I think that will be the next Mario game to come out.

GameSpy: What is going on with Mario 128?

Miyamoto: It's moving along secretly like a submarine under the water. When developing, we often look at the different hardware and run different experiments on it and try out different ideas. There have been a number of different experiment ideas that we have been running on the GameCube. There are some that we have run on DS, and there are other ideas, too.

At this point I just don't know if we will see that game on one system or another. It is still hard for me to make that decision. I am the only director on that game right now. I have the programmers making different experiments, and when I see the results, we will make the final decision.

GameSpy: That new adult Zelda game, could you run that on DS?

Sugino: If we wanted to re-create Ocarina of Time on the DS, we could do that very easily. We are researching a number of different things.