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Yesterday, we brought you the first part of the story behind the latest Nintendo DSi’s development. Today, we continue with the second phase of its life cycle at the offices of Nintendo where the phrase “upending the tea table”* seems like a way of life.
DSi Internal Software
So, now that we all know the crazy story of the hardware development of the DSi, let’s look into how things went down when the who’s who of software development at Nintendo sat down to put together the list of features they were going to add to the DSi.
Presenting a new DS
Many people who worked on the DSi had also previously worked on the Wii console, and all of them were very excited about adding a bunch of features into it. But of course, when you’re the one designing, you have to be careful about what features to pick. Matsushima, the person who designed the DSi Menu, describes his approach as, “I wanted to convey a sense of newness to users. With regard to my own work on the menu, I needed to figure out how to convey what was new with Nintendo DSi—such as the camera, SD memory card slot and internal memory—the moment someone turns on the power.”
A digital camera you can play with
Now that the DSi was sure to have two cameras, the next most important thing for the developers was to understand how to make this camera function. Masahiro Imaizumi, the director of the Nintendo DSi camera applications, says, “When we first thought about software for the cameras, there were two possible directions we could take. One was storing up pictures for yourself as a sort of personal photo diary or album. The other was using the pictures you had taken as material for play. The system would then be a kind of digital camera that you could play with.”
They ended up taking the second approach and enabled 11 different types of amazing things you can do with a picture immediately after clicking it on the DSi.
Playing with sound and music
By the time all the features were being finalized, the developers hadn’t come to a common ground on whether they would be including the music capabilities be default or allow users to download it from the Nintendo DSi shop. They finally got around to adding it as a default and decided to display vertical and horizontal axes for manipulating the pitch and playback speed using the stylus.
Shigeru Miyamoto, the “father of modern video games” was also a part of the team that worked on the DSi. Miyamoto explains the idea of including the axes, “You can have quite a lot of fun just changing the speed and pitch. You can change your mother’s voice to sound like an old man’s, and it’s good for copying guitar licks by ear and mastering conversational phrases in English. Basically, you can easily play around with it the way we used to play with tape recorders. That’s what I wanted to make.”
Dedicated to fun
That’s what all this fuss is about. The guys at Nintendo say that they didn’t intend to create just a console with a bunch of stylish features in it to outshine some competitor; they wanted to enable users to truly have fun playing around with those features. The DSi has the music player and camera like many other devices, but the difference here is that the music player and camera have been broken down to provide users with much more than their traditional functions—of just helping you listen to music and take pictures. You can manipulate the sound, edit the images, and do lots of other fun stuff in it, which no other traditional device offers you.
In other words, the team at Nintendo didn’t intend for the DSi to be the next best music player or camera. They wanted it to be a gaming console that helps you impart your personality onto it and have fun no matter what you choose to do with its features.
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