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17 Jul 08
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Videogame controllers generally feature a bewildering array of buttons, and watching an avid gamer work the device, thumbs pattering across plastic, can be intimidating. By contrast the Wii's wireless, motion-sensitive remote, which Miyamoto had been dreaming of for years, often requires no button manipulation whatsoever.
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Nintendo is churning out over a million units a month and still can't meet demand.
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six months after the Wii's launch, sales are accelerating.
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But the Wiimote's magic really comes down to a $2.50 chip developed by a company in Cambridge, Mass., called Analog Devices Inc., (Charts) or ADI. Known as a three-axis accelerometer (see graphic), the chip precisely measures movement in three dimensions. At four square millimeters, several accelerometers would fit on your thumbnail.
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Miyamoto realized it wasn't a fear of gadgets that kept the average consumer from playing games. "TV remotes are always sitting out on a coffee table or on the sofa, but videogame controllers - people don't want them lying around," he says. "In that sense we thought we were losing to the TV remote. So we thought, What kind of controller can we create that won't make people afraid to touch it?"
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Under Miyamoto's creative direction Nintendo has never had a problem coming up with great games. Pokémon, Super Mario, The Legend of Zelda - Nintendo titles have dominated the bestseller list for each Nintendo console. But that's not necessarily a good thing for the company. Third-party games increase consumer interest in the hardware, which sells more software.
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Yves Guillemot, president and CEO of French game publisher Ubisoft, says Nintendo has become the top console maker to work with. Two of Ubisoft's games, Rayman: Raving Rabbids and Red Steel (in which you use the Wiimote like a sword), have sold nearly a million units each. "We looked at the capabilities of the Wii early on and saw that it was solving the most important element in the game industry - accessibility," Guillemot says.
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when everyone thought the PS3 would solidify Sony's dominance, along came the Wii. With an unheard-of price and few quality games to choose from, the PS3 has produced disappointing sales; the father of the PlayStation, Ken Kutaragi was recently forced to resign his post as chairman of Sony Computer Entertainment.
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Nintendo takes its cues from the outside world - Miyamoto's garden, for example, which was the inspiration for the Nintendo game Pikmin. Or from the behavior of everyday people, like the way we leave our TV remotes on the couch. In Miyamoto's eyes technology is just a tool, and less of it is often more. "What I want to do," he says, "is to make it so people can actually feel something unprecedented."
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