Scenes from GDC

Entry #5, 1:06 p.m.: Nintendo: Heart Age

Nintendo President Satoru Iwata starts with a playful slight of tongue, telling the story of a corporate underdog that reinvents itself. Pepsi. It's a cute intro, and it's a telling that he can't very well do what Sony's Phil Harrison did here yesterday, striding out onto stage in front of a bunch of graphs that show the Playstation hovering unreachable above the competition. Iwata talks in language of "disrupting" rather than "leading", "dominating", or "beating". He gently mocks Nintendo's corporate structure in his careful clipped English, reading from a teleprompter and apologizing the single time he messes up.

It's also telling that Iwata has next to nothing to say about hardware, also unlike Harrison, whose keynote was interspersed with wonky tech demos and references to the Playstation 3's multiple CPUs. Iwata, on the other hand, introduces Brain Age by having G4 host Geoff Keighley, Sims developer Will Wright, and GDC director Jamil Moledina play math games against him (putting Keighley on a giant screen in front of a room full of developers to watch him repeatedly insist that six times nine is 63 is certainly one way to keep the press in its place). Iwata then announces that everyone in the audience will receive a free copy of Brain Age when they leave. His comment is followed by a good twenty seconds of sustained applause. We're all shameless.

Of course, no one is offered a free copy of Metroid Prime: Hunters, which is also demonstrated on stage by its own developers. Metroid is a sure fire thing. Iwata knows we're all going to buy that one anyway. It's Brain Age, which is the import of another one of Nintendo's successful domestic gambles, that could flop in North America. Iwata took a book about "brain training" and worked with the author to make a series of games that are supposed to gauge and improve your mental acuity. It's a sort of interactive persistent crossword puzzle/math quiz. You know how Sudoku (which is also included in Brain Age) is so popular? It's the same kind of thing. Nintendogs for people who dig brain teasers. "A treadmill for the mind," he calls it.

The announcement for Zelda DS: Phantom Hourglass was also an occasion for much enthusiasm. It's a 3D game with link apparently able to draw on maps, tracing routes for a ship or solving puzzles with a quill. Very little was said about the Revolution, although Iwata announced that some Sega Genesis and Hudson games will be playable. I have no idea what a Hudson is, but I'm looking forward to going back and seeing if N.I.G.H.T.S. is as good as I remembered.

Sitting here I understand why there are Nintendo fan boys. The company has such a distinct approach, with a playful and innocent tone that seems to inform, if not entirely subvert, its own corporate culture. Iwata says things like "If you cater to a vocal group of hardcore players, you won't grow". He criticizes the industry for focusing on big games with broad appeal to the detriment of the smaller weird stuff. "Our business is beginning to resemble a bookstore where you can only buy big sets of encyclopedias. No romances, no paperbacks."

He closes by hitting on a word I hate: "fun". But Iwata has already noted that fun means different things to different people. When he uses the word, it's not one of those lazy shortcuts reviewers use when they can't articulate something. Instead, it's Nintendo's indeterminate goal, a sort of cloud they're grabbing at, content with whatever handfuls they manage to get (I recall Miyamoto describing the art of game development as trying to make a net to catch fun.) "Our goal," says Iwata, "is that videogames are meant to be just one thing. Fun. Fun for everyone."