Shigeru Miyamoto Address Game Developers Conference

Miymoto started off by announcing that his speech would be "a very different kind of keynote, a personal experience" and boy was he right, he even showed a bunch of his own photos using the Photo Channel on the Wii console, first off showing his very own garden, zooming in to reveal some Pikmin!

Miyamoto then talked through a brief history of gaming, starting with the original Donkey Kong, moving upto into Mario era, then GoldenEye followed by GTA and Halo. This apparently caused Nintendo to hit a crossroads in terms of development, something which is obviously apparent after looking at Nintendo's direction over the past few years.

"They thought that we were changing gamers into some kind of zombies, and this troubled me. Players themselves seemed to only want more of the same kind of game. We as developers felt we had to make these games in order to sell them, so this was a period where Nintendo and myself found ourselves at a crossroads."

He went on to explain that there are 3 elements to Nintendo's corporate vision, first up with Expanding Audience, which we have all seen with the wide array of "non gamer" games. Miyamoto explained that he measures this against his wife, the more interested she becomes in games, the more its working. He talks through the beginning when his wife would never play video games, explaining that as each new title came along she has become more and more interested. Games such has Animal Crossing, Nintendogs and Brain Age have apparently finally converted her into a gamer. He even admits that Mrs. Miyamoto is often the winner in Brain Age.

Second point of importance is Nintendo's devotion to the entertainment business, this means the company won't go off on a tangent and start making Media Centres or Microwave Ovens. He explains that keeping your development teams close is also of great importance.

"It's a group collaboration. In creating Wii, this process was more intense than ever. We had different teams trying to reconcile their separate viewpoints."

He went on to show some of the controller prototypes we've seen over the past few months, including the infamous Star Controller! Next the master talked about a museum called Shigureden in his birth town of Kyoto, he explains the interactive screens that appear all over the place, controlled by a DS!

Finally the third element of Nintendo's vision is risk - daring to do things different. He explained that it wasn't until E3 that they realised that Wii was worth the risk, the huge queues at the event confirmed the acceptance of their idea.

"What I always think about is the core element of fun within the game. To do that I imagine one thing - the face of the player as he or she is experiencing the game, not any individual part of the game itself."

Miyamoto then displayed a bunch of games that demonstrate this vision, including Wii Play, Zelda, Wii Sports Baseball, Animal Crossing etc..

Mii's - the idea was to keep them really simple to start with, apparently there is an updated Mii Channel in the works that allows a new kind of interactivity between Mii's - related to Sony's "Home" announcement? Who knows

Finally he moved onto something new, Super Mario Galaxy "will be available this year" cue the super pretty fancy video demoing the game, he ends the speech with "If we can combat my wife we can combat anyone".

Fancy reading an entire commentary of the speech? Head on over to EuroGamer.net.