Ever imagined you're an astronaut, crash-landed on an unknown planet, able to plant your own army of space elves to fight aliens and repair your ship? Perhaps not since you were a kid.
Shigeru Miyamoto, the 48-year-old manager of Nintendo Co's development division, does that every day for a living. His multicolored Pikmins, who sprout from seeds and wear petals as hats, are among the new characters available with the GameCube game console, which goes on sale today in Japan.
The father of the Mario Brothers and Donkey Kong epitomizes Nintendo's strategy for retaking its former dominance in the US$20 billion video-game market. While Sony Corp and Microsoft Corp will rely on high-performance chips to make shoot-em-up games more bloodcurdling, Nintendo is betting on the talents of its game designers to make enchanting games for a younger audience.
It's an approach with risk. New videogame consoles from Sony and Microsoft, with their built-in DVD players and Internet capabilities, are designed to appeal to a much broader audience of game players, potentially shutting Nintendo out of that segment of the market. The Kyoto-based company also risks alienating gamers accustomed to fancier graphics and games with adult-oriented themes, analysts said.
Miyamoto's supporters see it differently. For Nintendo fans and video-game developers, Miyamoto is to video games what Walt Disney was to animation. Of more than 170 Nintendo game titles, about a quarter feature Miyamoto's Mario Bros, Donkey Kong and Zelda characters.
"Mr. Miyamoto is one of Nintendo's great assets -- he is a brilliant game designer," said Joseph Spiegel, a fund manager at Spinner Asset Management LLC. "Nintendo offered titles that were different and interesting." Pikmin is one of six Nintendo-made game titles to be available for the GameCube this year. Though the console's debut was somewhat subdued -- analysts said a shortage of software titles and pre-orders kept customers out of stores -- Miyamoto's fans were nonetheless supportive of the designer.
Nintendo's focus on kids isn't just a business strategy: it's also a reflection of Miyamoto's Peter Pan persona. He came up with the Pikmin concept, for example, as he watched a group of ants march through his grassy yard while gardening at his new home.
The beauty of such simple ideas is that they are relatively cheap to bring to reality. That's a breath of fresh air for an industry thrust into Hollywood-style flops and blockbusters by faster chips and jaded game fanatics, meaning that only companies with the deepest pockets can survive. Capcom Co, for example, spent ?1 billion (US$8 million) to develop Onimusha, a Samurai action adventure game for PlayStation 2 that sold about 1.5 million copies worldwide.
"Over the last several years, game designers spent energy to make games look good and did not have time to think about game play itself," Miyamoto said. "But, what is most satisfying for a game designer is to make a big hit out of a game developed with very little hardship."
Miyamato describes his creative process as drawing on a blank white canvas in his mind.
Sony has already sold more than 15 million PlayStation 2s worldwide. Nintendo hopes to sell 4 million GameCubes globally by the end of March, selling them for US$200 each -- two-thirds the retail price of PlayStation 2s. In Japan, GameCube will sell for ?25,000, or 28 percent less than its rival.
Already available for the GameCube are Wave Race Blue Storm, a jet-ski game, and Luigi Mansion, an action game featuring Luigi of Mario Brothers fame, who this time around must save his brother from the clutches of ghost inhabiting a haunted mansion. It plans to release four other games for the console this year, including Pikmin.
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