Today we’ll be talking about how Wii Fit was created. First, I’d like to interview Miyamoto-san, the man who first came up with the concept behind this project. Normally, I have you appear at the end of my interviews, but because I can’t very well proceed without asking you why you decided to make such an unusual product unlike any before it, you’ll be up to bat first this time round. So, let’s begin.

My pleasure.

Miyamoto-san, you’re known for repeatedly creating games based on your hobbies, such as Pikmin¹ for example, which was based on your hobby of pottering around the garden, and Nintendogs², which was based on when you first kept a pet dog. With Wii Fit, you’ve managed to incorporate your interest in keeping track of your weight into a product.

1	An AI action game for the GameCube that revolves around searching for parts of a destroyed spaceship alongside mysterious life-forms known as Pikmin. It was released October 2001 in Japan and June 2002 in Europe.
2	A communication game for the Nintendo DS about enjoying spending time with your favourite puppies. It was released in September 2005 in Europe.

So I have! (laughs)
I’ve been told in the past that it’s better not to mix my hobbies with my work, or that it’s best not to try and make something I know intimately into a product, and I actually agreed with those notions at the time. However the simple fact remains that concepts like Nintendogs and Wii Fit work very well as games, and I’m glad that I was able to be involved in their development while maintaining a customer’s point of view.

Well then, to get us started I’d like to ask you about your hobbies. What was it that got you interested in keeping track of your weight?

You know, this is likely to lead in to quite a long story. Is that all right?

Be my guest! (laughs)

Up until now, there have been numerous times when I’ve become aware of my body. For example, when I graduated from university and joined the company, I ended up putting on weight. We were so busy back then, and I’d say things like “The only thing I look forward to is having a bite to eat”...

So you were pulling long hours, and having late night snacks? (laughs)

Precisely! (laughs) It continued along those lines, and then I got married and put on even more weight... So, eventually it dawned on me that this was no good, and once I turned 40, I decided to take up swimming.

Yes, I remember you used to say quite often that your back ached before you took up swimming. But once you’d started, it got better.

It did. One of the main reasons I started swimming was because my doctor told me that the pain in my back was due to being out of shape. But when I started regularly going to the swimming hall, my weight dropped quite a bit, and it felt like my overall fitness had improved as well. I started thinking that getting fit could actually be fun.

So that was how you first got into it?

Well, it does feel good to be active, doesn’t it? I also think there are some psychological benefits from becoming absorbed in doing something. I used to play pachinko³ many years ago, but that stopped when I started swimming. Simply swimming without thinking about anything except how demanding it was had a similar effect to the stress relief I got from pachinko, which enabled me to escape the cycle of worries I had.
Another thing I managed after quitting pachinko, was to stop smoking which also lead to better fitness. To be completely honest though, I don’t really like being thought of as such a serious person. I mean, I didn’t drink in the first place, and on top of that, I managed to quit smoking and get actively involved in doing sports, so I must seem like some kind of goody-two-shoes school prefect! (laughs) Even though I thought this lifestyle didn’t exactly suit my personality, I felt good about my body.

3

Pachinko is a popular Japanese game which is a mixture between a slot machine and vertical pinball. The player controls the speed at which many small steel balls are thrown into the pachinko machine in order to send them into special holes, and the aim is to get as many balls into the holes as possible. The balls won by the player can be exchanged for prizes.

Even though you weren’t aiming for absolute perfection, right?

Right. So, once I got better at swimming, I became able to swim effortlessly.

So you felt like you could swim long distances easily?

Yes, that’s right. So as a result, the actual amount of exercise I did decreased, and I started to put on weight again! (laughs)
At that point, I became interested in the changes in my weight, and after a bit of research, I learned about a special weight monitoring diet⁴. I thought this was quite interesting, and though I didn’t record the results, I started measuring my weight on the old analogue bathroom scales we had in the house. While I was doing that, my wife suggested buying better scales, so the next time she went shopping with the kids, she bought me new bathroom scales that could measure in 100 gram units, and featured a body fat measuring function. That was how I got started recording my weight on a graph.

4	A dieting method where you measure your weight at a certain time every day and monitor the changes in your weight.

I think most people normally wouldn’t even think of tracking their weight on a graph.

Personally, I quite enjoy doing things that become habitual, as if it was daily routine work. I put the scales and graph paper in the bathroom, and after continuing the pattern for a month, it became like a ritual before getting into the bath. I wasn’t able to relax without doing it! (laughs)
Anyway, I was able to continue with it. In fact, once the graphs I’d recorded started to pile up, I started to feel a strange fondness for them – regardless of whether I was gaining weight or losing weight.

When was this?

I’m not quite sure, but I think I started about 4 years ago. I’d already been keeping graphs for about a year when the Wii Fit project first started.

At first, before it became known as Wii Fit, the title “Health Pack” was used.⁵ When you first came up with that prototype, how did you think you would develop it into a product?

5	Health Pack was a working title for Wii Fit used until the E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo, an annual video game conference held in the United States) event in July 2007

The prototype didn’t actually consist of anything at all. This caused the staff a lot of bother, as we only had the core weight-measuring element. Once we’d settled on the Wii concept, one of the things we decided on was that it should be something families could gather around. We thought about what game would be good to have a copy of in every home, and out of the selection, we had Wii Sports⁶, Wii Play⁷ and also “Health Pack”...

6	A sports game bundled in with the Wii console in Europe that includes 5 sports: tennis, baseball, bowling, golf and boxing.
7	A game that introduces users to the Wii Remote, released alongside Wii in December 2006 in Europe and bundled with a Wii Remote.

So with the core element of measuring one’s weight, did you have any specific idea of how things would develop?

Well, when I was measuring my weight, I’d do it naked in the bathroom, so I couldn’t very well do it in front of people. But I’m sure it would be fun for people to measure their weight in the living room with the whole family, take data every day and check the graphs, then maybe poke fun at Dad who’s put on a little weight, or congratulate Mum on her diet, etc.

Incidentally, (Takashi) Tezuka-san⁸ still takes pictures of his meals with his phone whenever he has something to eat. How long has he been doing that for?

8	General Manager of the Software Development Department at EAD (Entertainment Analysis & Development Division). Works on series such as Mario, Yoshi and Animal Crossing alongside Shigeru Miyamoto.

I think it must be since around the same time I started recording my weight.

What a pair! (laughs)
One who measures his weight and records it daily on graphs, and the other who takes photos of all his meals!

That started from the same sort of idea – that it would be useful if you could just input the photos you took of the things you eat.

So, even elements like that became ideas for the project.

They did indeed. We even thought about making it so that you could take your DS out with you and store data on what you ate. With health as part of the Wii catalogue, we also saw the subject of food ahead of us. We asked the director to create a system where you could easily enter the things you ate into the DS, and also had the planner begin an experiment where he’d measure his weight. However, I’d already reached the crux of the development of titles like Wii Sports at that stage, so I ended up neglecting the project, asking others to take care of it. Sometimes they asked me “What are you going to do about it?” (laughs)

The staff members who were suddenly told to measure their weight and record the things they ate must have been quite perplexed, mustn’t they?

Yes, I think they were. They must have had absolutely no idea what they should do. Please ask the staff appearing in the next interview about that one. I just told them to make a pleasant interface or gave them some hints to make it useful.

It’s like a dialogue between a Zen monk and his follower, isn’t it? Though, game design always tends to be like that at first.

For example, I told them that we certainly couldn’t make it so that when you enter the amount of rice you’ve eaten, a message comes up saying “I ate X grams”. It’d be much clearer to touch the rice icon and then have three bowl icons appear, by which I was trying to emphasise the importance of streamlining the input system. I also told them that we ought to think about what kinds of things can be done every day when a device which measures your weight can be connected with the Wii console. It must’ve been quite a challenge for the team to grasp the feel with only vague instructions like that, so I’m sure they must have been really struggling with it. Furthermore, there were only three people handling the project: the planner, producer and director. Not to mention that we hadn’t decided in which direction to take the software yet, so we couldn’t increase the number of staff assigned to the project either.

So basically, the project started with a mere three people, and development didn’t start smoothly, when the only instructions given were to measure one’s body weight and to record the things that one ate.

At first, I’d have them bring me what they’d made, only to repeatedly send them away again, saying things like “No, that’s not quite it”.

At that time, how did you envision the product’s future?

I definitely had an image of family members talking amongst themselves, saying things like “Dad, you’ve put on a bit of weight lately!” Also, I thought that if the face of the person who measured his or her weight appeared as a Mii, the software could encourage the whole family to get together around it.

You mean the idea of family members having fun by talking about each other’s weight, don’t you?

You’d be really happy if your wife and daughter were talking about you while you were out, right?

Much happier than if I was being ignored! Even if it were mostly bad things they were saying about me! (laughs)

I just thought having relationships like that within the family would be ideal. I know this may sound a bit extreme, but measuring your weight is fun, and there are ways to keep fit when thinking along those lines. Though we were trying to move in that direction, we couldn’t decide on what the next step would be and work came to a virtual standstill – until, that is, a member of staff bought two scales, and found that it was pretty good fun to step on both of them at once and try to balance on them evenly. At that point, I asked the programmer to connect two scales to a computer and set it up so that your balance would be displayed on-screen numerically in a way that would be understandable even at a glance. When we did so, we decided to attempt to make measuring one’s balance a theme for the software. We were sure there were methods of keeping fit involving balance, and when we looked into it, they did indeed exist.

So after a process of trial and error, you learned that balance was the key. At any rate, the experiment you conducted with the two scales was essentially the prototype for the Basic Balance Test portion of the Body Test⁹ you do when you first use Wii Fit, right?

9	Measures your centre of gravity, BMI (Body Mass Index) and athletic ability, and based on this will then present you with your “Wii Fit Age”.

That’s right. All sorts of things developed from there. As I was working on other titles such as Wii Sports, I asked them to look for sports trainers and researchers well-versed in balance and see if they could supervise the project. It was from that point on that I really thought it had become a true project, but with one major difference, there were still only three members of staff! (laughs)
I’m sure they were still thinking “What’s he going to make us do now?”

I think it’s often the case when making something that, even if there are a hundred reasons against it, you’ll still make progress if you have at least one brilliant idea under your belt. What was the process like with regards to Wii Fit?

There were a whole bunch of reasons against it. I think you know this quite well, but I’m the type who picks out all the bad things when setting about creating something. I quite enjoy determining what is good and bad about hardware, because the process of creating something while trying to minimise the bad parts feels like solving a puzzle to me. With that said, since this project had more than its fair share of issues, I felt it was really worth doing. We had all sorts of reasons against the project. What would we do if someone accidentally dropped the weighty board on their feet? Who would want to measure their weight in front of other people? How could people accurately measure their weight with their clothes on?

People do waver sometimes when presented with a host of reasons against doing something. Sometimes they think “This is no good, this is unreasonable,” sometimes they think “That’s not true, I can fix it.” I watched you to the end, and I didn’t see you waver once on this project.

I always say this, but I enjoy making things that are unlike anything anyone has ever made before. Everything you think of becomes a new idea, and even if it’s nothing big, it’s still a new idea. That’s why I always thought of this as an issue worth challenging. I was also convinced that you can have fun just by measuring your weight.

So you were confident that you could make something interesting because you enjoyed simply measuring your weight and collecting the data.

Additionally, I thought this project perfectly suited the Wii concept of involving the whole family. That’s why I felt it was my mission to make it into a full-blown product somehow, and went to all the necessary lengths to eliminate the negative elements connected with it. However, just when development got underway, the scales manufacturers we had talks with didn’t show much interest in the idea. We subsequently decided that we’d just have to go ahead and make it ourselves, fully aware that if we just made it like ordinary bathroom scales you could buy anywhere, it’d be just plain boring. That’s when, after a process of trial and error, we settled on the idea of making it so that you could balance on four points: front, back, left and right, and this in turn lead us to the idea that we could also use it as an interface for a game. While we were busy working on that, the Wii Board gradually took a form that was much more than just ordinary bathroom scales.

When did the idea to balance on four points come up?

When the planner was putting together a variety of prototypes for us, he initially experimented with using only two sensors. However, to keep costs down as much as possible, he tried removing one of the sensors, but wasn’t able to get results he could be satisfied with. That was when we decided to just go for it and throw in sensors at each of the four points. Though the cost went up, we thought we’d probably be able to absorb the cost by designing it all by ourselves. When we had two sensors, we could only measure left and right balance, but with four, we could measure balance for left, right, back and front perfectly, and it matched the accuracy of the two scales we first started using, so we continued to push the development in that direction. Until that point, the content of the game consisted of a list of sports-based exercise activities, but with this development, we concentrated on training balance.

What kind of experiments did you do when working on the software?

We experimented with radio exercises. We did an experiment where we stepped onto the Wii Board and exercised to see if it would be able to tell if you were really exercising by checking the changes in your balance. Many DVDs related to exercise are already on the market, so when we started thinking about what couldn’t be done with DVD, we hit on the fact that we could check whether or not you were actually exercising. So we continued the experiments while using radio exercise¹⁰ music, and by measuring balance we found out we were able to do a lot of things quite accurately.

10	Japanese public radio stations broadcast exercise instructions to music early in the morning for performing warm-up exercises.

Checking whether you’re actually doing it or not appears in Wii Fit in the form of elements such as the trainers' dialogue, right? For example, if you’re in the middle of exercising by standing on one leg, and lose your balance and put your foot down, they’ll tell you, “Did I see you put your foot down during the exercise?” (laughs) You couldn't do that on DVD.

And if a person with a different weight steps on, it’ll tell you “Your weight seems a bit different from the last time.” It’s watching you! (laughs)

Early revisions of the Wii Balance Board would only let you balance left and right. But with four sensors, you could balance left, right, forwards and backwards, and not only did the specifications change greatly because of this, but it seems the design also underwent a long process of trial and error.

Since the basis of this plan originally began with scales, the first Wii Balance Board concept was almost perfectly square, like bathroom scales. I tried getting on it and doing a few exercises, but it just didn’t feel right. After I tried doing press-ups on it, I told the staff that I wanted them to change the dimensions to make it roughly shoulder-width, but they immediately responded with excuses like “it’ll cost more if we make it bigger, you know.”

Since it comes bundled with the software, there must have been a strong desire to reduce the cost wherever possible, even by a single yen.

Well, it was me who was telling them to reduce the costs in the first place, so I can’t really blame them! Though the square version of the Wii Balance Board really did feel uncomfortable, the design had already come pretty far, so we knew we really had to pull our socks up... (wry smile)

Ah, here it is – your last resort, upending the tea table¹¹! (laughs)

11

This is a reference to the classic Japanese comic and animated series, Hoshi of the Giants. The father in the series once upended the tea table while the family was eating a meal. Shigeru Miyamoto's working style has been compared to this because of his tendency to make last-minute suggestions that leave everyone else scrambling to implement them before the deadline.

(laughs) When I asked them “Can’t you choose a size based on the width of a person’s shoulders?” they told me “But if we do that, the strength will change and it’ll end up making things very difficult.

I remember the stunned look on the face of the hardware planner when the size of the Wii Balance Board changed.

Well, I was hoping he’d start to smile in the end, but... I am truly sorry about that, though.

Still, if you try it out for yourself, you can see why the Wii Balance Board became the size it is now.

There’s even a game known as Snowboard Slalom¹² included among the Balance Games in Wii Fit, and now that the Wii Board is a rectangular shape, it does feel more like a real snowboard. It wouldn’t feel right if the Wii Board were square now, would it? That’s why I thought something more snowboard-like might be better than something square, like bathroom scales. The problem was that, if you made it too big, it wouldn’t fit comfortably into the living room. We settled on a size close to that of a person’s shoulder width, though the result might be a bit small for bigger people from other countries. We measured the shoulder width of all sorts of Japanese people and finally decided on the current size after making a set of trial models of varying sizes.

12	A snowboarding balance game played on the Wii Balance Board.

You also went as far as investigating what percentage of people you could cover by doing such things as adjusting the size of the Wii Board based on the average size of Americans’ feet, didn’t you?

That’s right. Since Reggie¹³ at NOA was scheduled to come to Japan to attend meetings of overseas executives, we had him get on the Wii Board and even measured his shoulder width. (laughs)

13	Reggie Fils-Aime, president of Nintendo of America Inc. Also appears on stages and makes presentations when Nintendo holds press events in the US.

There were people with bigger feet than Reggie too, weren’t there?

Yes, and we even found lots of people with large feet in our Japanese offices. By the way, didn’t you upend the tea table this time as well?

We’ll get to that later... (laughs)
Originally, the Wii Balance Board had a cord that connected to the Wii Remote, which it used to send wireless signals to the Wii console. With this setup, the costs were kept down.

Well, I’m quite frugal that way! (laughs)
Also, attaching new peripherals to the Wii Remote is one of the Wii concepts, so I was hoping to do something like that, until you told me it would be awkward…

I just couldn’t see myself kneeling down to plug it into the Wii Remote just to measure my weight. I also thought it was better not to force our customers to do so, either. That’s why I insisted on this point. You could probably say that was the extent of my influence on the specifications of Wii Fit. (laughs)

Indeed. But thanks to that influence, we ended up with deluxe specifications! (laughs) When we made it so that you plugged the Wii Board into the Wii Remote, we also had an additional safety concern of what would happen if you accidentally stepped on the Wii Remote. So that issue was resolved, and the appearance of the Wii Board became much more streamlined as well.

This way, it really is easy to weigh yourself every day. I think if you had to attach or remove the Wii Remote every single time, it would detract from the simplicity.

That’s right. Bearing in mind that grandparents may also use it, it’s got to be the kind of shape that makes it user-friendly so that when they feel like just giving it a little try, there are no unforeseen complications. Since they’ll be weighing themselves, it has to be more fun and simple than using bathroom scales, doesn’t it? To achieve this, we devoted a lot of our attention to what kind of interface we used and what you had to do in order to start playing. We’re about to release an accessory unlike anything anyone’s ever seen before, and one that connects to the TV at that, so it was really worth working on.

There are no scales without a display, let alone any that use wireless signals to display information on the TV.

It is a truly special piece of hardware. I thought it would be better to use wireless signals since people weigh themselves in the bathroom in the first place. But if we made it so that you’d weigh yourself in the bathroom, you wouldn’t be able to see the TV – so after discussing some things, we decided the more practical approach of doing it in front of the TV would be more interesting, and that’s how it became the way it is now. Additionally, we also thought it would be nice if all sorts of software supporting the Wii Board other than Wii Fit came out. Wii Fit has games featuring snowboarding and skiing, and we initially thought that might be enough, but it would be nice if other software came out for people who’d like to challenge a variety of courses and so on.

I think it’d be nice if some new, simpler software that used the Wii Balance Board came out as WiiWare¹⁴. I think if you suddenly released new software for the Wii Balance Board at full price, the publishers would find it a bit difficult to market as packaged software to be sold in shops. That’s why I think it’d be good if you could download less expensive software onto your Wii instead of just relying on boxed games.

14	An upcoming service only for Wii allowing paid downloads for new software. Launches March 2008 in Japan.

Yes, that would be nice. Maybe I could make that? I could make a version of the Snowboard Slalom with improved courses, or maybe 1080° Balance Boarding¹⁵!

15	This is a reference to the 1080° snowboarding games released on the N64 and GameCube.

(laughs)

Now, I’d like to ask you about the software component of Wii Fit. Normally, when creating software for bathroom scales, you usually choose to have it calculate one’s body fat percentage as well.

We actually stuck with calculating the body fat percentage for quite a while, but we dropped it in the end. Since that was when the key word “balance” came up, we concentrated on making the best use of the concept.

Ironing out the concept of the software and wrapping it up concisely is one of the keys to development. The things you could do with the Wii Balance Board developed in several directions, with some sections organised as Balance Games¹⁶, some as Aerobic Exercises¹⁷, some as Muscle Workouts¹⁸ and others as Yoga¹⁹. Were those the categories you started off with?

16	Games designed to improve your sense of balance.
17	Exercises that encourage the burning of fat in the body.
18	Exercises to tone up certain muscles of the body.
19	Exercises where you stretch your body to improve your posture.

At first, we hadn’t categorised it that much. First when we were doing various experiments, we decided there would at least be games. After that, we decided to add yoga. Yoga was originally part of a separate plan from Wii Fit. Yoga was undergoing an upsurge in popularity in Japan at around the same time as we were conducting the planning meetings, so there was a staff member who wanted to make yoga-related software. But I rejected it outright by saying, “You can’t just put something into a product because it’s popular, you know! It might look like a good plan, but it’s no good as a product.” Still, when we were putting Wii Fit together, we thought “Let’s include the staff member who was toying with a piece of yoga-related software too.” (laughs) I said, “The yoga software is starting to make sense with the Wii Balance Board.” As a result, he took part in not just the yoga section but the development of the rest of the package as well.

The boss monkey still has to give his followers bananas after he bites them! (laughs)

(laughs) Yoga became one of the categories, but we still had to work hard on addressing the balance between the other three. First we thought of many training routines that you could do with the Wii Board and had a professional trainer, Mr Kaoru Matsui, assess them for us and eliminate the ones that would be less effective. At the same time, we asked him to recommend routines for us to implement. That was how we decided which activities to include, one after another.

That reminds me a lot of Dr Kawashima's Brain Training²⁰. We created a lot of training exercises for that piece of software and then asked Dr Kawashima²¹ to judge and identify the ones which worked and the ones which didn’t. We had a bit more experience when we made More Brain Training, so of all the ideas we submitted to him many more were successful and were accepted after the approval process. A lot of our ideas were rejected and not incorporated for the first one though.

20	Dr Kawashima's Brain Training: How Old Is Your Brain? is a piece of software for the Nintendo DS that offers many brain training activities and was released in Europe in June 2006. It was followed by More Brain Training from Dr Kawashima: How Old Is Your Brain? which was released in Europe in June 2007.
21	Dr Ryuta Kawashima, a Japanese professor, oversaw the production of both pieces of software in the Brain Training series.

Since I’d been doing a lot of swimming and exercising at the gym, I thought that it was essential that we included aerobics in this software. At first, Step Basics was part of the Balance Games section, but we later decided to include it in Aerobic Exercises instead. We also decided to add the Hoop Twirl exercise to the same section later on. Once we’d done so, that section really began to take shape, and just when we were starting to think about adding something else to the line-up, I just happened to see an experiment done by the Wii Sports team.

Isn’t that where the Jogging activity, in which you jog with the Wii Remote in your pocket, came from?

That’s right. I thought it was pretty good fun. As we didn’t know if there was going to be a Wii Sports 2 at the time or not, I gave the director a call and said to him, “This idea’s really good, and since there’s no official word on Wii Sports 2, could we have it for Wii Fit?” (laughs) Then I told the Wii Fit staff “I know it’s a little late in the project, but put this in too”, and the Aerobic Exercises selection finally started to meet our standards.

That’s a classic example of putting a good idea to great use.

As a result, the Wii Fit staff members were swamped with work, so I asked the Wii Sports director to lend me a programmer as well. (laughs) This all happened at the very end of the development process, but being able to do things like this is one of the great things about EAD. Even with someone else in charge, the programmer helped a lot and got on well with the other team members.

Normally, you’d hear people saying how they don’t like working in a different development environment, or that they don’t want the other guy to take the credit for their work. (laughs)

Everyone got along relatively smoothly in that regard.

Incidentally, I’ve been doing that Jogging exercise every day! (laughs)

As it doesn’t use the Wii Board, it deviates from our original production rules, but I thought that if we had several good games that you didn’t need to use the Wii Board for that were fun, then it wouldn’t really matter.

That’s one of the funny things about you. Weren’t you the one who told them to make everything a Balance Game? (laughs)

(laughs)

You broke the rules of the project yourself! (laughs) But the way you did it actually ends up giving the game a sense of variety. Also, I think there’s a huge difference in the impression you get between having Hoop Twirl under Aerobic Exercises as opposed to, say, having it under Balance Games.

I took a lot of care with regards to how the customers would see it. Normally, I’m pretty picky when it comes to making the manuals, but this time I was even more picky than usual. I paid a lot of attention to how the developers would have wanted the product to be seen by the customers.

Wii Fit is a new kind of software that’s unlike anything that’s been done before. We really wanted to stress this in the manual so that new customers who purchase the product who’d never read a game instruction manual before, could understand. That’s why when you get on the Wii Board, the Wii Board character²² tells you all sorts of things on-screen. I can’t get enough of that. (laughs)

22	An on-screen Wii Board character, who is a cute anthropomorphised version of the Wii Board.

When the Wii Board’s batteries are running low, he tells you something. It may be a little hard to hear though...

That’s one line that I really want the customers to hear. (laugh)

At first, someone asked “Why not have sounds when you get on the Wii Board?” So we experimented with that, and found it was more fun making the sounds with your feet.

If it didn’t say anything, it’d just be normal bathroom scales, but if you get on this every day and hear the Wii Board character speak, you might eventually get quite attached to it.

Wii Fit itself is a completely new kind of software, but there are other new things within it as well. For example, it’s the first piece of software to have its own dedicated Wii Channel²³.

23	Built-in software programs included with the Wii console that resemble normal TV channels. Examples include the Mii Channel and the Forecast Channel.

Wii Fit has a certain convenience to it that bathroom scales can’t match, but because it requires you to turn on the TV and Wii console first, you can’t get on it and weigh yourself right away like with normal bathroom scales. Even if we can’t do much about that, we decided that we’d have to avoid the time it takes to put the Disc into the Wii console and start it up. That’s why we designed it so that you can go directly into the software from a Wii Channel without the need to put in the Wii Fit Disc. You can look at graphs and do your daily measurements just by launching the Wii Channel. We’d decided this at a relatively early stage of the planning process.

I think it was quite a good idea that when you look at the Wii Channel, you’ll have, for example, Dad’s Mii appearing with the text “Weighed on day x” like a news ticker. It could inspire situations like your daughter telling you “Dad, you didn’t weigh yourself today, did you?!”

If you’re just weighing yourself, you can do it in 2 to 3 minutes, so I want people to do it every day without feeling it’s a chore. Also, the other new thing we’re trying is the mode with Jogging + and Step +, which you can play while watching TV²⁴.

24	Wii Fit features game modes you can play while watching the TV, using only the sounds of the Wii Remote. These modes consist of a jogging exercise and a step exercise.

In this mode, you can play while watching normal TV programmes without needing to see a game screen. It’s actually one of the plans that I’d been holding on to, so I felt like I’d been beaten to it. (laughs)

I’d wanted to use the idea for a while, and I knew there was no way I’d miss the opportunity this time round. For example, with Jogging +, the Wii Remote speaker will start beeping, and…

Tell you something like “You have 5 minutes left.”

At the recent Nintendo Conference²⁵, the MC, Miho Nakai²⁶ said to me, “You could even do it while watching a live marathon.” I think it’d be quite interesting to run while watching something like the Tokyo-Hakone marathon relay race.

25	A presentation event held at the Makuhari Messe in Chiba on 10 October 2007. Wii Fit was made playable for the first time in Japan.
26	A freelance presenter. She was the MC on the Nintendo Conference stage.

So, now you can finally play games without looking at the TV just by relying on the sounds coming from the Wii Remote. But if you slack off, the Wii console can tell!

If you don’t run properly, it’ll tell you to keep a steady rhythm. So if you then set the Channel back to the game screen, you’ll start to run properly, right? Once you’ve confirmed “All right, now I’m running properly” on the game screen, you can then return to the TV programme you were watching.

It feels quite strange playing a video game holding a Wii Remote while the TV displays something else on-screen, doesn’t it?

Wii never sleeps. (laughs)

I don’t think you could get away with that if you weren’t using a machine like Wii with low power consumption. At any rate, it must have been very difficult working on Wii Fit at the same time as Super Mario Galaxy, musn’t it?

Actually, it was fun working on both. But with Wii Fit, I made a lot of discoveries as there were so many things being done for the first time. Even after going home, I’d think of something interesting, and I could hardly wait to get back to work the next day and tell everyone about it!

I’m sure the staff members must have been really shocked to hear those ideas the next day! (laughs)

As the Wii Fit team was in another room, there were people who’d pretend to be working very hard and avoid eye contact with me when I went up to them! (laughs) Well, that’s something you can ask the younger staff about in the following interviews.

Well then, please give us your traditional message to our customers.

When you’re playing with a controller, if you‘re struggling you might say that it’s because the game is difficult, but with physical activities like Wii Fit, you would tend to think that the fault rests with you and not with the software if you can’t do it. But at least you’d be left with the satisfaction that comes from performing physical activity. Because of this satisfaction, you’d want to try it one more time. You’d feel like doing things such as just standing on one leg are good for you. And when you manage to pull it off properly, you’ll feel a new sense of accomplishment.

Now that you mention standing on one leg, one of the things that Wii Fit made me realise was how different people can be between when they’re standing only on their dominant leg and when they’re standing on the other. It was quite a discovery.

I think it’s important to make discoveries like this about yourself. I forgot to mention something important earlier: I don’t think Wii Fit’s purpose is to make you fit; what it’s actually aiming to do is make you aware of your body. That’s why we wanted people to talk with their families about Wii Fit, and become aware of these things together as a group. If you’re standing still, and it tells you “Your body is swaying”, you can see on the training results screen that your body has been shaking. But I think you’d never realise that your body is shaking in day-to-day life. I think becoming aware of things like this about yourself is quite interesting.

When I tried it for myself, I made a lot of discoveries, and I think it’d be great if the customers can enjoy making the same kind of discoveries for themselves as well. I’d also like it if people could talk about their balance and weight with their family, and others as well – and before they realise it, they’ll have become more conscious of their fitness, and that could lead to a healthier lifestyle.

I think that once you make weighing yourself with your family part of your daily routine, it’ll be hard to imagine life without Wii.

Thank you very much. In the next interview, I’ll be interviewing the development staff who created the unprecedented Wii Balance Board.