David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…I'll say, the portable side is the side that's paving the future for what Nintendo would become for better or for worse. They're the ones who were having this very strong opinion of, let's innovate on a gaming device and what a gaming device is. To this point, that hasn't really been Nintendo's MO. You look at the NES, the controller is what you would expect. The SNES, okay, cool. They came out with the shoulder buttons on top, the L and R, okay, that's a small step forward. The N64 (I think) does deserve credit, particularly Mario 64. That was the first game and game system that showed how to do 3D games. It was incredibly innovative. Totally agree. The GameCube is a very me-too console. Everything about it is like, we wish we had done some of this on the N64, but it's a little too late now. But what you're seeing in the handheld, especially in the DS is, okay, this is super innovative to have two screens. One of them is a touchscreen with the 3DS that would come later. One of them is a 3D screen. Nintendo is starting to, at least the handheld group, figure out, the way forward for us is we design innovative hardware that can inspire new types of games to be played and new types of games to be designed, especially by our first-party team in-house. That does all kinds of amazing things for them. Think about the Wii, think about the Switch switching literally, and the joy-cons and how popular that is. It also does terrible things for them, which we'll talk about for the Wii U. This is when they really discover they are unapologetically innovating on the hardware to play games, and that is what defines them. This is so much the future direction for Nintendo that in 2002, when Hiroshi Yamauchi is leaving the company and transitioning to the next CEO, Satoru Iwata, and leaving it in his hands, his final request is, "Nintendo give birth to wholly new ideas and create hardware which reflects that ideal and make software that adheres to that same standard."…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.