Trackball controller for Xbox 360
“Pippin also lacks a keyboard for sending electronic mail. Instead, Pippin presents a picture of a keyboard on the screen, and users choose letters by moving the cursor with the trackball on the hand-held controller.” — Andrew Pollack, NYT, 1996
(Source: The New York Times)
Sony Dual Shock 2 defacing at the flea market (Taken with instagram)
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Yamamoto: It took a mountain of trial and error to make that d-pad. We’d give a prototype our engineers had done their very best to refine to Mr. Yokoi for his impressions, asking him “so? How is it?” He would just say “it’s not ready.” That happened over and over.
Izushi: We really did make a mountain of prototypes. Mr. Yokoi was very meticulous. He wanted players to have precise control without looking at their fingers. That was why we put a depression in the middle of the d-pad, among other things.
Iwata: I see. I think it’s fair to say that his meticulousness led to the creation of one of the cornerstones of video game culture.
” — Iwata Asks: Game and Watch - The Reproduction of “Ball” for its Thirtieth Anniversary(Source: neogaf.com)
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“In bringing Wii to the world, we’ve filled up countless boxes with mock-ups, prototypes, trial software, and so on. But I truly feel that none of our efforts were wasted. These concepts came and went at a remarkable pace, until we came across those special technologies that solved all of our problems at once. Nowadays, nobody has any doubts about the “d-pad with two main buttons” interface. But twenty years ago many people wondered whether such a controller could really be used to play games. So, if we continue to do what we know has to be done, our controller, which now appears quite unusual, may very well become the new standard.” — Mr. Iwata, President of Nintendo, on the design process.
(Source: videogamesblogger.com)
“A game console’s industriel design (ID) is strongly related to the application, or software, that will be used. Although I’ve specialized in ID since my university days, I’d never encountered ID so closely connected to software until I started here at Nintendo. With controller design in particular, you really have to be aware how your design will be used when playing a game. With Wii, however, we had our work cut out for us because it wasn’t completely clear what kind of software would be created for this console.” — Mr. Ashida, industrial designer at Nintendo
(Source: videogamesblogger.com)
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Iwata: Virtual Boy was, I think, a commercial failure. Normally, I think it would have been understandable if Nintendo experienced a kind of trauma with regard to the whole 3D genre. But Nintendo continued to doggedly make attempts in 3D technology. And you could say that those attempts have now finally borne fruit. I feel like that is an interesting progression of topics.
Miyamoto: Right. Another complicated thing is that 3D graphics were a major theme for both Virtual Boy and Nintendo 64. Things may have turned out differently if the two devices shared their technology, but they had different purposes. If you think of Nintendo 64 as made to confront 3D head-on, Virtual Boy was using different technology to aim at enjoyment of 3D without rushing in the general direction 3D was headed at the time.
Miyamoto: To be more concrete, Virtual Boy was aiming at using wire frame models6 to simulate a 3D space. If you think about the power of CPUs at the time, that makes sense. But not many games used that method of visual representation. Most of them lined 2D images up at different depths to create a three-dimensional effect. […| If nothing but wire-frame fighter craft had appeared and Mario and other beloved characters had never shown up, that would be a little sad. But if you only changed the depth of a 2D image of Mario, it wouldn’t bring out the real appeal of the Virtual Boy. So the Virtual Boy system was a complicated affair.
” — Iwata and Miyamoto on the failure of the Virtual Boy in the nineties.(Source: iwataasks.nintendo.com)
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