Satoru Iwata, Nintendo’s president, set one of the targets for the company’s next console with a small pile of DVD cases. “I actually stacked up a few DVD cases and said, ‘I’d like to make it about this size!’” he recalled later. The engineer in charge of the console’s structure remembered being “more stumped than shocked.”
It was an odd instruction in an industry that measured progress in power. Hardware engineers normally plan from industry roadmaps, forecasts of where chips, discs and wireless technology are heading. Shiota, who developed the new console’s chips with Nintendo’s partners, described the usual contest as “How much faster is the CPU, how much more memory is there, and how many more polygons can be displayed?”
Nintendo had been losing that contest. Its previous console, the GameCube, sold 21.74 million units. Sony counts more than 160 million PlayStation 2s.
About a year into development, Takeda, who oversaw the project, started to doubt the roadmap. Following it would have meant “faster and flashier.” And after talking with Nintendo’s development partners, he came away convinced that “there is no end to the desire of those who just want more. Give them one, they ask for two.”
Nintendo started from a different question. Iwata put it to a hall of game developers in San Jose in March 2006: “why is it that anyone feels comfortable picking up a remote control for a TV, but many people are afraid to even touch the controller for a video game system?” Years earlier, he said, when he began talking about casual players and non-gamers, “few people listened.”
Every part of the machine answered to that question. The controller became a one-handed wireless stick that looked like a TV remote, and Iwata insisted it be called one. The console had to fit in the cramped space beside a living-room TV, so it shrank to the thickness of three DVD cases. (Two turned out to be impossible.)
Shiota’s team used cutting-edge chips the other way round: to cut power, so the console could be left on 24 hours a day. That meant the fan could not spin at night. Iwata’s reason: “If the fan is spinning in the middle of the night, I could just imagine mothers everywhere pulling the plug right out of the wall because they thought it had been left on again.”
Shiota admitted to feeling anxious about the choice. Leaving the map, he said, “takes a lot of courage.”
Nintendo spent its money somewhere else. The new controller, Iwata told the developers, was expensive to develop and to include with every console. “Some people put their money on the screen, but we decided to spend ours on the game experience.”
The Wii went on sale in the Americas on November 19, 2006. By Nintendo’s count it sold 101.63 million consoles. Sony counts more than 87.4 million PlayStation 3s, and Guinness World Records puts Microsoft’s Xbox 360 just behind the PS3. The box the size of three DVD cases had sold nearly five times as many as the GameCube.