We're at the Nintendo Shigeru Miyamoto keynote. It's starting any minute now.

I just spoke with Reggie and asked him if there were going to be any fireworks during the keynote. He said "a couple." He's the second one to tell me that today's keynote isn't going to be quite as bland as people initially expected. Hit the jump to follow along. Brian Crecente

Niero from Destructoid just stopped by and starting bowing to us. Mike M pretended to unzip his pants. Not an auspicious start to the event.

That and Chobot is dancing around. Odd.

The music's quite nice. We're now 15 minutes past when it was supposed to start. No announcements, though I see movement behind the curtain up there.

I just ran over and talked to Phil Harrison, after reading in our comments that he's here in the front row. I asked how he got the choice seat. "Membership has its privileges," he said.

"I hear something might happen here today, what do you think? Are you looking forward to it?"

I'm just happy that I'm able to sit here and don't have to be up there."

I like Phil, he seems like a nice guy.

They just told us to quiet it down. Ah, here comes Jamil Moledina.

He's introducing Shigeru Miyamoto, pointing out that while he's called the Steven Spielberg of gaming it probably doesn't do him justice. It should be the other way around.

Moledina says its time to present a different kind of keynote a personal experience with Miyamoto.

The lights when down and Mii Creator came up on the screen and here comes the real thing, standing on the stage with Bill Trinen and Moledina like he is on the Wii.

"I can't believe its been eight years since I've had a chance to talk to you, you haven't aged a bit, just like me."

Miyamoto is going to use the Wii and the photo channel to do his presentation. Screw power point.

He's going back to the beginning to Donkey Kong. He's showing pictures of kids playing games, of him playing Super Mario World wearing one of those skinny black ties.

Now he's talking about the top games of 1998. Top of the list was Goldeneye 007.

"Within a few years, something changed."

He shows the top games in 2004, topped by GTA.

He said the questions asked of him changed too. People started asking what sort of effect games were having on people.

"Even as sales went up, our reputation went down."

This was a period when Nintendo and myself personally found ourselves at a crossroads.

All of this leads me to my topic today, the essence of any game designer. The creative vision, as well as Nintendo's vision.

He's talking about the Nintendo difference now.

First is the Expanded Audience.

Shigeru says he has his own way of determining how good a game will be. He calls it the Wife-o-meter. It measures the interest level of his wife.

He's talking about how as games became more casual, his wife became more interested in gaming.

Now he's talking up Nintendogs and talking about the fact that why his wife loves cats, he loves dogs.

Now he's talking about his dog Pick.

"Getting back to my point today, this relates to moving up the wife-o-meter. I was watching our dog friends and my wife. Maybe if we could get these people and turn them into game players we could expand the user base. When I eventually showed (Nintendogs) to my wife, she finally started to look at video games in a different way. And then came Brain Age, this is the game that turned her into a true gamer."

Shiggy says that on Valentine's Day he returned home and heard the sounds of the Wii. Initially thought she had waited up for him, but in fact was just casting votes on the Everybody Votes Channel. It meant she had decided to use the Wii on her own.

"This is a big event in my house, It would have been more expected for me to come home and find Donkey Kong eating at our table."

Now his wife brags about being able to beat him on the second Brain Age and she's always playing Wii Sports and making Miis.

"I think this is something that is very lucky for me. She is learning to create things. I think this is her first step to game design."

The second key element to Nintendo's vision is the company's devotion to the game industry. They don't have to worry about diversification or expanding beyond this market.

The entire company, both on the hardware and software side, only think about game design and game hardware design, he says.

Shigeru points out he's had a hand in designing every controller for Nintendo since they got in the business. Which means it was easier for him to work with the team. Those creations, he says, were all group cooperations.

With the creation of the Wii they had different teams working on different elements of both the design and the ideas behind the new console.

Now he is showing off a bunch of different controller prototypes. Finally, they decided on the tv remote-like controller. That final version, he said, was the result of a lot of collaboration between many different teams.

At one point we even wondered with the recent advances in portable gaming, did we even need to have a device that connected to a TV at all.

As a controller the Wii remote does a lot of what I have always dreamed of as a designer.

Nintendo definition of technical progress often focuses on new interfaces.

He's showing off the museum that Ashcraft visited for us awhile back for ancient playing cards in Japan. Ash did a great feature on it and the technology for us awhile back.

Shigeru said he was put in charge of producing http://kotaku.com/gaming/nintendo/shigureden-poetry-readings-151079.php">the interface.

Now he's talking us through the museum, something Ash did quite well. Here's Ash's original story with tons of pictures. Essentially you use a DS to move through the museum and interact with it.

This bring us to the third element: Risk.

None of our risks have ever rivaled the design of the Wii.

:"Frankly the Gamecube was just a half step toward working with a wider audience."

He says that while they were fairly secure about taking the risk, they weren't sure if it was worth taking until E3 and the reaction they got there.

But corporations don't make video games, people do.

My primary focus in development are not the individual pieces, he says, instead he concentrates on the core element of the game. He does that by thinking about the face of the gamers, what they will look while they play his games.

Now he's taking us to MyFirstTouchDS, which shows people's first experience with the Nintendo DS. He's showing us one of a little girl giggling manically as she plays. Now an older person laughing away as he plays.

"Not only is the person playing the game being happy, but the person around them are getting excited and that's what I've always wanted as a designer."

"In my personal case the feeling I strive for is positive. So I keep this image of the person playing the game in my mind until the game is finished. If I think that we have lost our way in a game design, then I'm going to take that risk and, as people say, up-end the tea table."

"When we are creating a game, we have to force ourselves to make the game purely from the viewpoint of the gameplayer. If I feel this so strongly that I think we need to drastically change a spec, I will up end a tea-table."

"I think my vision of a happy gamer's face is a good match for Nintendo's vision."

He's talking about the success of Wii Play now.

Oh, now he's saying that reviewers maybe need to add a new way to score games, something that reflects how fun it is to play a game for people who don't normally game.

Now he's talking about Communication. I hope to god they announce they're getting rid of Friend Codes. Please get rid of Friend Codes. We like names, thank you very much.

Right now he's talking about single player versus multiplayer gaming.

Zelda was confusing to those in Japan, he said. They told him to make one way through the dungeon, no multiple paths. "But I ignored them."

He said he took their sword away from the beginning of the game because then they would know what they wanted to do. And in turn they would start to talk and think about the game, share their ideas about how to beat the game.

It was a new form of game communication.

"In this sense Zelda became the inspiration for something very different: Animal Crossing. This was a game based solely on communication."

He's talking about prioritization now. People are always complaining about not having enough, he says. Not enough graphics, not enough gameplay, but as a developer he needs to prioritize.

:He's talking about applying prioritization to Wii Sports baseball.

The game, he points out, only has one stadium, has no real teams and the characters themselves are very simplistic.

"We had these concerns in Nintendo, but we agreed that our time could be better spent making the game feel more realistic."

They spent all of their time working on pitching and hitting.

It was only by applying this strict priortization that we were able to deliver this game on time.

Being a baseball fan myself I'm really hoping I will be able to play a more realistic baseball game on the Wii.

The final aspect of his personal mission is about tenacity.

He's talking about a indoor pitching machine, a sort of real world toy Nintendo once made that never took off. Shigeru never forgot about that and finally was able to work that into Wii Sports with Baseball.

Next he's talking about the disc drive on the Famicon. He showing how you can draw your own face on the old Famicon.

"So this was coupled with something called the Scenario disc which would animate the face. I thought this would be a great idea, but there weren't many people who agreed with me."

"It awoke from hibernation after several years."

When the released the Nintendo 64 they sold a similar game to members of their service in Japan.

The key features of this program were the wide variety of clothing and the editor.

Then came the e-Reader in the GameBoy advance and the GameBoy Camera.

Again they tried a similar approach. He's got some super freaky avatars up on the screen James Browning it up. The audience is all clapping.

I'm a little scared.

Shigeru said it was obvious that it would be a huge hit, but the Nintendo folks said it's funny, but how's it a game?

When Wii planning begin, again he returned to the same idea.

He said Iwata told him one day that the DS team was working on a similar game and making good progress.

"I said this is exactly what I was thinking of. I went back to my team and said you guys are useless. I then left them for awhile and worked with this other team for awhile."

Shigeru says that while it was always a good idea there were questions they could never answer, like how is it a game or how could it be used. The Wii answered those questions.
Over the years his idea became less of a game and more of a utility because of the increases in technology. They were actually reducing the number of people would play with it. But once they limited it, it became accessible to a wider audience.

"My tenacity finally paid off, but only when I was willing to take the risk of looking at the problem from a different angle."

Today people are so taken with the Miis around the world. Im working on a new Mii channel.

With this channel we are going to let people compare the Miis they created in a popularity contest.

And you will be allowed to do this with people from around the world.

Now he's talking Mario. What happened to Mario 128?

When people ask me what happened to Mario 128, I'm already at a loss of how to answer. Most of you have already played it, but you played it in Pikmin.

You will be experiencing a new element of Mario 128 soon in Super Mario Galaxy.

He's showing a video of Super Mario Galaxy.

The video shows Mario soaring through the air, running around globes, rotating surfaces and shooting from vines with gravity shifting on him.

Wow, some really amazing stuff here and the video just ended.

"You'll be able to play Super Mario Galaxy this year."

My main message is that creative vision isn't just one element of game design it is the most important element."

"We much reach out to those to not only those who don't understand video games, but those who fear it. Wouldn't it be great if we could get them to play games too?"

"We are humans, and our job is to entertain humans and to do that we must always remember the human touch."

"After all if we can convert my wife, we can convert anyone."

And the show's over.

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