Miyamoto on Future of Controllers, and What He’d Like to Be Remembered For

During a recent interview with Edge Online about (what else?) Wii Music, Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto spoke about where he thinks controllers will be in ten years, and whether or not we will still be using devices such as the Wii Remote and Nunchuk as the new standard:

Miyamoto:One of the challenges we’ve seen with the videogame industry is that we’ve come so far with what is now considered the classic videogame controller, when you’re so used to using the same thing over and over again over many years, as a creator you run into creative blocks where it’s hard to break out of that mould and come up with new ideas.

Of course, if I were to say that we were going to change the interface right away in the next generation, the people who have been learning to work with these controllers would be upset. But I would think that somewhere down the road you might find a way to make an even more intuitive type of interface that might make it even easier for people to interact with videogames.

I think that at some point in the future we’ll probably see some type of change.

Edge Online:Beyond Wii MotionPlus?

Miyamoto: That’s a good example of how we make improvements of what has become the standard controller and we’ll see that evolve and, again, we’ll likely come to a point where people might run into those creative blocks after they’ve explored all of the opportunities for that controller. And then we’ll move on to another new and different type of controller. — Edge Online

It leaves one to wonder what the next big step will be.

In addition, Edge also asks Miyamoto what he would like to be remembered for after he retires:

I often look at the pattern that we’ve seen with the Japanese manga industry and hope that I can have something like that.

If you look at the history of Japanese manga you have the very early manga artists like Osamu Tezuka, who really defined the style and continued to pioneer in that realm and draw new manga and created new styles along the way. I think the other key thing about them is that they continued drawing up until the day they died.

I would be happiest if people look back some day and say this is somebody who was there when videogames first started being created and he’s somebody who was continually creating new styles of play and was bringing new ideas to games and was a pioneer up until his dying day. — Edge Online

Hmm, interesting… from that, it sounds as though Miyamoto plans to stick with the business for a long time to come.