Continued 3
Let me add one more note to this story. Those first retailers, after playing the first game, agreed to buy a total of 70,000 units, which was still more than our domestic sales team expected, but I was not satisfied with that number. But between the launch of the first game and the second, you could see a disruption of the market occurring across Japan. Something had changed. New people were playing.
Seven months later, we returned with samples of the second Big Brain Academy game. This time, no demonstrations were needed. The retailers quickly placed orders for 850,000 units. And even that turned out not to be enough. It recorded the biggest first-week sales for any DS game ever.
As of right now, the three brain games, including Brain Flex, have sold more than five million copies in Japan alone. The moral of this story is pretty clear. If you want to succeed in game development, you need to follow two simple rules: # First, listen to your board of directors # And second, listen to your chief financial officer
The development of this game came from our belief that people wanted something new. In this case, that game took the form of a treadmill for the mind. But we also learned that the only real way to demonstrate the appeal of these games is to have people actually play them. At Nintendo in Japan, we had employees take the game home and show it to family and friends, especially people who weren t game players.
Quite a few of our employees were surprised that their parents and wives who would never show any interest in gaming were suddenly playing this everyday. That helped to build buzz. So, I decided that the same thing might work here in America. And that the best time to start is right now.
So, when we re finished this morning, I thought you should test your own brain age to play yourself, and to show it to a friend or colleague or even your parents even if they have never played games.
So as you leave my keynote address, please take a copy of Brain Age with you as a gift from Nintendo. Please only take one, and understand that the games are only available to pick up when we finish today.
The second story I want to share with you involves disruption of a different sort not only taking a different approach to a new technology, but also finding a way to make it attractive to everyone and thereby expand the overall audience. The topic was constructing the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection.
Many of you know that we have been experimenting with networks since the 1980s. Back then, you could use your NES in Japan to trade stocks. We kept working, but never thought the time was right to introduce a game network until Nintendo DS. In 2004, we began considering Wi-Fi gaming. From the start, we had several challenges. First, we knew that both Animal Crossing and Mario Kart would be arriving on the DS the next year, and we wanted them to feature Wi-Fi play. That made the development timetable very short.
Secondly, I insisted that our Wi-Fi interface be seamless. I wanted connecting to someone around the world to be as easy as connecting to someone playing next to you in the same room. As you know, this creates its own problems, because normally making things easier for players, makes things harder for developers.
But the most difficult aspect was deciding who players would be able to connect with. Online gaming normally belongs to the most aggressive players, and they can be a very vocal group. For the casual player, this kind of interaction can be very intimidating. I believed if we catered to only this very vocal group of hard-core players, we could never truly expand the audience.
Originally, we thought Wi-Fi should be set up as a kind of social network, almost a game-play version of MySpace. In Japan, we initially referred to the Wi-Fi system as project house party. We had in mind the comfort of inviting friends over to play in your own home. Well, at Nintendo of America this name was not very popular. They told us that this sounded like what you call a tupperware party. No matter what we called it, I believed the experience must be easy and fun.
What did I mean by easy? It s simple to connect a game on DS locally when you re sitting in a room with your friends. It should be just as easy to find those friends and play with them even if they re thousands of miles away.
But what is fun? That depends on the player. You may want to play Mario Kart only with people you know. Or you may find it more fun to try to defeat total strangers. Sometimes, the choice will be determined by the nature of the game. No one playing Animal Crossing wants someone to come in cut down all their trees and trash their town. What was important to me was that players have the choice, and the freedom to choose which way to play.
For developers, easy and fun doesn t mean the work will be easy or fun. There were many barriers to overcome. And my colleague, Mr. Takao Ohara, will share those stories with you later here at the GDC.
In the end, it is the freedom of choice, I believe, that has made the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection so successful. To date, we have surpassed 1 million unique players, totaling more than 29 million play sessions and, this in only 18 weeks of availability.
We reached 1 million players almost five times as fast as the Xbox Live service, which also offered free connections when it began. It took them 20 months to reach 1 million different users. Of course, this has made our Wi-Fi development team very happy as you can see.
What you can t see is that sign they re holding up, a message to all of you. So let me show you what it said: We love the GDC. They all wanted to come, but I told them, Sorry, no. But I did promise I would bring their picture.
As you know, this week we added a new wrinkle to the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection. Voice over internet protocol arrived with Metroid Prime Hunters. It introduces a new level of fun.
At first, I thought you might like to see a Wi-Fi demonstration of the game. But I know Wi-Fi is nothing new for you. In fact, I imagine many of you have already played Mario Kart DS wirelessly and seamlessly. Instead, I think the true appeal of the game is seen best if we hold our own four-player battle right up here on stage. Again, I d like to invite Bill Trinen to come back on stage to get the battle underway.
[Bill Trinen, from Nintendo of America s localization team, demonstrated the wireless game play capability of the Nintendo DS game, Metroid Prime Hunters, among a group of volunteers]
Thank you, everyone. I know I am much better watching this game than playing it.
When we talk about expanding the market to new players, many times this means new kinds of software, but certainly not always. I hope that Metroid Prime Hunters shows we re not turning our backs on the kind of games that current core players already love. We will serve all tastes.
Our new Tetris DS is something even your grandmother will enjoy. On the other hand, you can compete head to head with nine different people on a local network, or three others via Wi-Fi.
We are also going to bring our first all-new Super Mario Bros. game to the DS in a matter of a few weeks. For those of you who have been waiting for the next great Mario game this is for you. And because you re all such game fans, I ve decided to reveal one more brand new adventure for you today
[The audience was shown a demo reel of the The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass]
