Over at Game|Life, Chris Kohler has a rather hasty but somewhat interesting summary of a Nintendo.jp feature on the design philosophy and evolution of the Wii.

Nintendo chief hardware dude Genyo Takeda talks about how, as soon as GC was finished, they had to start thinking about the next hardware system. If they followed the accepted industry roadmap, they'd think about giving it better graphics and more power.

But then they started thinking, wait a minute, even if we do this, is it really going to have as much of an impact on players relative to the cost? If you give people 1, they want 2, give them that and they want 3. Where does it stop? 5, 10, 100...? This creates a sort of malaise because they'll never be satisfied.

So they figured they wanted to create something different. They started to wonder why video game systems couldn't be refined like other technology — like, rather than make a bigger, more powerful system, take what you have and make the chips smaller, make the box smaller, make it consume less power.

Ultimately, they decided they wanted to take the GameCube level hardware and make it so efficient that it would only use 1/3rd to 1/4th the power, while still maintaining high performance. Chris says this is only a partial summary — he'll post more tomorrow. Good, because that seems like pretty much the worst idea for a console ever, from a gamer's perspective. It's like reading about the design evolution of my utterly craptacular green-friendly Florian Eckhardt

Iwata Interviews Wii Developers [Game|Life]