Shigeru Miyamoto On The Wii Fit

Wired has an interview with Wii Fit creator Shigeru Miyamoto that provides an interesting insight into how the Nintendo veteran conceived the original idea for the ‘fitness’ system and then developed it to the format it is today. Miyamoto says that the original idea came from inspiration from his personal hobby of, erm, weighing himself:

So, this is a hobby?
Yes. Well, yeah, I was always a fan of sports. I never really participated in specific sports or anything, but once I hit 40, I started to get a little bit more active and began swimming more. So when I was about 40, I started having problems with back pain, and I think a lot of that stemmed from the fact that I worked at a desk all day. So that was when I started swimming. And then when I hit 50, I started weighing myself every day, and I of course track that and create my own graphs to watch my weight. I found that to be very interesting. So, when I first started weighing myself, my family thought that was kind of fun, and so they bought me a very nice scale. And, so then I started creating the graphs.
I’d always wanted to try to find a way to make a game out of that, and I felt that with the Wii, that’s something that I would normally do in the bathroom is weigh myself. But, with the Wii, if there was a way that we could take that into the living room and turn it into an experience that everybody takes part in, then that might be fun.

Who is the Wii Fit consumer? Is it women doing a lot of yoga?
We’ve obviously been doing a lot of consumer surveys and been getting the data back in Japan. What we found is 60 percent of the people purchasing Wii Fit are males right around age 30. Often the case is that the wife is interested in getting it, and the male is making the purchase. But, what we found is that everyone in the family is playing it, and actually there’s a really good balance. There are some people who are pretty much just playing the balance games. There are some people who are playing pretty much the yoga and others who are focusing on the strength training. But, overall, it’s very well balanced in terms of which activities people are doing; 40 percent of the people that we surveyed said that they bought a Wii in order to play Wii Fit.

[Regarding] the aging population in Japan. Does Nintendo see that as a growing market that the company wants to start capturing right now?
That is a good point. I think one thing that we always struggled with is the fact that even though in Japan there is the aging population, and you do have elderly people in the home, videogames were always seen as something that was for kids, and so we’ve always tried to find a way to branch out of that mold and reach that audience. I also think that the peripherals we’re creating probably have a slightly different objective than, say, the guitars for Guitar Hero. I think with Guitar Hero the idea is that people who are playing games can kind of live the fantasy, and you feel like you’re playing a guitar and yet you still have the complicated button control that you experience in other videogames. Whereas, what we’re trying to achieve with things like the Balance Board and the Wii Wheel is controller interfaces that are more intuitive and more welcoming to a broader audience.

Q&A: Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto Talks Wii Fit | Game | Life from Wired.com