Nintendo's Miyamoto Sees GameCube on Track

LOS ANGELES/NEW YORK (Reuters) - Japanese video game maker Nintendo Co. Ltd. intends to meet its original target of shipping 4 million of its GameCube game consoles by the end of its fiscal year in March, its head designer said on Monday.

Nintendo had said in December it might increase global shipments by as much as 13 percent, mostly in the United States, because of strong holiday sales.

In an interview with Reuters, Shigeru Miyamoto, an international legend in the game industry who is in the United States this week on a promotional tour, said the company still planned to ship 2.1 million units in the United States and 1.9 million in Japan by March 31.

Miyamoto, whose formal title is director and general manager of Nintendo's entertainment analysis and development division, said he recently was in Europe, apologizing to game industry press and analysts for GameCube's late shipment there.

The console's European launch is set for May 3. GameCube was introduced in Japan in September and in the United States in November.

Amid great fanfare, Nintendo last year launched GameCube, a high-powered video game console that vies with Sony Corp (news - web sites).'s PlayStation 2 (news - web sites) and Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox (news - web sites) for a piece of the nearly $10 billion U.S. game market.

While the fight was essentially no contest, with Sony continuing to dominate, experts say game makers are focusing this year on delivering key titles to spur new demand for the boxes and drive what is expected to be more sales records.

"What will be important in the future is to be able to convey to the user the differences in our brands, and our franchises," Miyamoto said through an interpreter.

EMPHASIS ON GAME STORY, AUDIENCES

Miyamoto was coy in discussing details about upcoming GameCube games, deferring instead to what he said were a number of announcements planned for the Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3, the industry's trade show set for May in Los Angeles.

Among the properties Nintendo is expected to formally unveil at the show is "Mario Sunshine," the latest in the series of games featuring Mario, a squat plumber who has been Nintendo's franchise character since 1985.

Some of those early games, many from the company's original Nintendo Entertainment System, have shown up on the Internet as small data files that can be downloaded and played, in substantially their original format, with programs called "emulators."

While the emulators are legal, the games themselves are not unless the user physically owns the actual game cartridge, and Nintendo has actively opposed the trade in those files.

"I'm actually very grateful that people still find such fun and entertainment in those games," Miyamoto said.

Many of the people who first played those games as children are now grown, and Miyamoto said Nintendo is focusing more than ever on producing games for all age groups.

"We don't think in terms of younger gamers versus older gamers," Miyamoto said. "I still think the best policy is to focus on these games that have a wider appeal."

Miyamoto also said modern game designers have fallen into a trap of designing games that are more focused on exploiting a console's hardware capabilities than telling a story.

"I don't see that there is much of a need to continue to progress in the direction of even more realistic and beautiful graphics," Miyamoto said. "We really need to move more toward creativity, and new ideas.

"In the game industry we see this trend to create the most realistic games," he said. "I see that as kind of limiting what the game creators are able to do and limiting their freedom."

Last week Nintendo said it would work with two other game industry companies to manufacture a graphics board based on the GameCube's hardware, with an eye toward commercializing the technology in other game consoles.