The Story of the Wii

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Winnow
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The Story of the Wii

Post by Winnow »

This is a very good read about how Microsoft and Sony turned down the motion control technology before Nintendo finally picked it up.

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/37 ... ry-of-wii/


Long article but worth the read. Some quotes from it:
In 1998, a journalist for The New Yorker asked Bill Gates which of Microsoft's competitors he feared the most. "I fear someone in a garage who is devising something completely new," he replied.
"Through my business connections, the first games person I got in touch with was Steve Ballmer," he says.

"I pitched this motion control device to him and he loved it. He set me up with the Xbox team in Redmond [Washington] for a second pitch and I remember how incredibly excited I was about it. Things were happening so fast.

"But the meeting went terribly. The attitude I got from them was that if they wanted to do motion control, they would do it themselves and make a better job of it. I mean, they were just rude. In fact, the meeting went so terribly that one of the executives came over to me afterwards and apologized on behalf of others. I remember him saying how this was not how Microsoft should be engaging with potential partners."
"Through his connections, Yoshida got me in touch with a Sony guy that looks after games. So I flew to their offices and was given a meeting with a man called Ken Kutaragi."

Quinn was unaware at the time that Kutaragi was the most influential person in the entire games business. The "father of PlayStation". The man who broke a thirty-year curse and produced two market-leading consoles in succession. A visionary whose self-belief reached a critical mass when creating the PS3; a problematically ambitious and comically expensive machine that many games developers loathed coding for.

But in 2001, before all the PS3 problems and resignations, it felt like Kutaragi had the entire industry in the palm of his hand.

"I'll never forget that meeting at Sony," Quinn says. "We were in a tiny little room with a big PC projector and Kutaragi comes in, introduces himself, sits down and - I swear this is true - he closed his eyes the moment I started showing my pitch. He never opened them until I had finished.

"It was awkward, very awkward, but I still asked him for feedback and he said, 'well, can you produce this for 50 cents?' I laughed and explained that would be impossible, so again I left empty handed and, to be honest, that time it got to me. I felt pretty let down. You have to remember that Sony and Microsoft were by far the two biggest console manufacturers. Nintendo wasn't doing well and we hadn't thought much about them."
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