GDC 2011: Satoru Iwatas keynote speech recap

Missed this mornings keynote? Heres recap of Iwatas most interesting talk

Early this morning (Australian time) Satoru Iwata went on stage at the Game Developers Conference to give his keynote about the last 25 years of gaming history. However before covering what’s come before, Iwata showed off a couple of quotes from developers about the current state of game development.

There’s only one quote that Iwata says matters and that is one Mr Miyamoto told him. That quote was that "Content is King". On a personal level Iwata told his story of how he started HAL Laboratory, he even showed a picture of himself from back then. He told a story of how he thought he was making better games than Mr Miyamoto but when Miyamoto’s games outsold his, he realised that engineering a game isn’t as important as having a good imagination.

He also spoke on how teams back in the day were smaller and everyone on the team had to wear different hats. Each day you could have a different role, one day you could be a sound designer, the next a game designer – or you could be the person getting the lunch. He described them as "videogame cavemen".

For the next part of keynote Iwata divulged some statistics about who is playing games, revealing that Nintendo conduct two surveys a year in order to find out who is playing what. He also described the jump of game players in the world from 2007 to 2010, of course attributing them to the Wii and the Nintendo DS.

Iwata then moved his attention to social network games and social games. Yes, Mr Iwata believe these are two separate things. While many people play games on social networks, playing a game socially is much different. A game like Space War was originally considered a ’social’ game in arcades and games while early networking features were also the beginnings of social games. Iwata also cited that the NES and Atari 2600 with multiple controllers, made these social consoles. Making handheld systems social was a harder tasked, however the link cable with Tetris allowed this to happen.

Satoru Iwata also then took time to recognise the effect the Call of Duty franchise has had on social gaming. In an even more surprising move, Iwata gave props to Microsoft for their Xbox Live network.

He then moved on to talking about what makes a ’must-have’ game. The kind of game that everyone wants. Sometimes this could have been delivered by hardware, he cited the Gameboy as being a ’must have’ as you could take the gaming anywhere. However sometimes making hardware isn’t enough. Iwata then spoke on what games, even non-Nintendo ones have been able to create themselves as ’must have’ games including Angry Birds, Sonic, Tetris and Guitar Hero. The other third way is to make a social experience like World of Warcraft.

Iwata says Mario has only remained popular because he has changed over the years. Nintendo has evolved what Mario does and giving players new experiences. He also mentions that Tetris was the first game to attract female gamers and more recently The Sims has done this. Iwata joked that many predicted that the game would never find an audience. There are now 125 million copies of it out there.

’Must-Have’ games however must also have "universal appeal". He cites Donkey Kong, and Nintendo will explain tomorrow in another panel how they make Donkey Kong a internationally friendly game. As an example he revealed that Kirby’s original name was ’Tinkle Popo’. Nintendo of America didn’t take too kindly to the name and also changed Kirby’s color from Pink to White on the box of the original Gameboy game. “Maybe they didn’t think I would notice. I did.”

Iwata then moved on to the point he was trying to make. The next ’must-have’ in gaming is the Nintendo 3DS. The included software on the console like the AR Cards and Face Raiders is also part of this. These will make people go ’Hey, you’ve got to see this!’. Nintendo themselves are not immune to this as Iwata says Nintendo staffers have been doing this a lot at Headquarters, himself included.

He then went on to talk about Nintendo’s online services even admitting that "Nintendo can do better". He frankly reveals that “Our WiiWare and DSiWare services have not operated as well as they should.”

At this point, Reggie-Fils Aime took to the stage to cover what Nintendo is doing to fix this. What Reggie had to say is covered in this article.

After Reggie left the stage, it was back to Iwata. While he mostly just re-iterated some points that Reggie stated, he did say he wanted to talk about some new games. First up a new Mario which will be revealed E3 2011. More on that here.

Soon after a new trailer (more of gameplay than anything else) of The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword was revealed. Iwata also said Miyamoto was working on something for the 25th anniversary of The Legend of Zelda with a fancy new logo on the screen behind him.

Wrapping things up, Iwata had some stern words about the industry. "Our business is dividing in a way that threatens the continued employment of those of us who make games for a living.”

While never mentioning it, Iwata makes his case for bigger and more expensive games over what we assume is a dig at games on the iPhone and other digital platforms. “The objectives of smartphones and social network platforms are not at all like ours." While never mentioning the App Store, the next statement kind of confirmed he was talking about it with Iwata saying that “For them, content is something created by someone else. Their goal is just to gather as much software as possible because quantity is what makes the money flow. Quantity is how they profit. The value of videogame software does not matter to them.”

He finished with “What we produce has value, and we should protect that value. All is not lost. Games must be quick and easy for people to describe, but it must also be unique. Do that and the game will sell itself."