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With the proliferation of music games on the market and the ongoing arms race between Rock Band and Guitar Hero, it was only a matter of time before Nintendo checked in with their own version. Wii Music, released two weeks ago, turns the music game genre on its ear by turning Nintendo's Wii into a vessel for musical composition and experimentation, allowing players to play around with dozens of instruments and musical styles. In fact, game designer Shigeru Miyamoto — whose legendary resumé includes Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros. and The Legend Of Zelda — thinks it goes beyond the type of gaming established by other music-based titles. "I don't know if we should even be calling Wii Music a video game," says Miyamoto. "I have been likening Wii Music to something that's more along the lines of a musical instrument than it is a video game."
What was the idea behing Wii
Music?
When we first began development of the Wii we really wanted that to
be a console that played a very central role in the living room as
kind of a social hub. We felt that in order for that to happen, one
of the subjects that we really needed in order for everyone in the
house to be able to relate to it was music. It wasn't that we
wanted to create a music game at a time when music games were very
popular — in fact I'm almost a little frustrated because I
feel that if we had released Wii Music when music games
weren't popular then people would perhaps be able to look at
Wii Music from the perspective of what it is rather than
from the perspective of what their definition of a music game
is.
Without a real competition element, what is the optimum
Wii Music experience?
I feel that one of the things that really can make a video game
good is not necessarily giving the player a defined goal that they
have to achieve, but instead inspiring the player to creatively
define their own objectives and determine what they want to do in
the game and how they want to get there. In that sense I think Wii
Music has really managed to achieve that because we've provided
people with really a tool or a creative system that allows them to
tap in to that sense and attachment to music that's really innate
to us as humans. Typically if you bring a musical instrument into
the home people will interact with it and they'll figure out how to
make sound with it but just being able to make sound with an
instrument doesn't mean that you're able to make music. With
Wii Music, within five minutes everybody in the house is
immediately able to play the instrument and because of the way it
is designed, playing that instrument isn't just playing sounds
— it's actually playing music.
Do you have any musical background
yourself?
I first started playing in a band back in college and for thirty
years have been practicing instruments and trying to perform in
bands. I'm actually not very good at playing instruments, but the
sound team is actually a group of individuals who, not only are
they good composers, but they are also great performers and they
play a lot of different instruments.
The song list is a strange mix of traditional tunes,
children's songs and pop tracks. What was the logic behind the
selection?
The song list was handled mostly by Koji Kondo. He's a composer
that I've worked with for years — he composed the Super
Mario Bros. theme song. Wii Music is a game that is
centered around improvisation and the ability to rearrange songs in
a variety of different genres, so two of the fundamental points
that we had to stick to was that we needed the songs to be songs
that everybody would know and they needed to have the type of chord
progression that makes improvising and rearranging easy.
There are a lot of fantastically strange instruments in
the game, like the cat suit.
What was the inspiration behind those?
The typical pattern when we're developing our games is that the
development teams will work very diligently to make the game and
I'll take a look at it and say "why does this game feel so serious?
You need some more silly things in there." But this time around I
didn't actually have to do that because the team was creating all
of those strange instruments of their own accord. Even the
cheerleader, which is another instrument in Wii Music, is
something that I didn't even have to suggest to them; I just turned
the game on one day and all of a sudden there was a cheerleader.
From that sense I would say that Wii Music was a relatively easy
development project for me.
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