The Age of the Unthinkable (15 page)

Something about Miyamoto intrigued Yamauchi at that first interview, so he asked him to come back for another chat. “Bring
some of your work,” he said. So Miyamoto did. He brought the hangers. People around the globe who have followed Miyamoto’s
career will tell you the story of the hangers, which had been wrapped and wound so that the hooks were shaped like the heads
of animals to appeal to children and make the act of hanging clothes into a game, as a mark of his precocious genius.
Miyamoto!
they exclaim of a man whose inventiveness was about to deliver billions of dollars of profit to the unsuspecting Nintendo
Corporation.
Miyamoto!
His name by itself stood for the charming twist on the everyday that those hangers represented, much like the simple plumber
Miyamoto would later twist into the star of Super Mario Brothers, a video game that has earned nearly $20 billion — five times
the amount of all six
Star Wars
films.

But in fact, of the projects Miyamoto presented in response to Yamauchi’s order to “bring some work,” the hangers were probably
not the most important. That honor belonged to something so impractical, so absurd, and so expressive of exactly where Miyamoto’s
real genius lay that one hardly knew what to make of it: a combination swing and teeter-totter he had designed so that three
kids could play together, one swinging away under the others, propelled by their up-and-down movements. The hangers weren’t
irrelevant. Miyamoto
was
interested in the refinement and tweaking of particular
existing
objects. This was what he did later in refining to perfection Nintendo’s flop Donkey Kong, which became the biggest-selling
arcade game in history. But there was something important, brilliant, and prescient about that weird-looking amalgam of a
plank, seats, and a chair on chains. It captured what was truly inspirational about Miyamoto, his instinct for strange, impractical,
and (pardon the phrase) game-changing combinations. If you had known it at the time, you might have gotten the same tingle
from that strange design that you would have felt looking at Picasso’s earliest Cubism, because what Miyamoto had delivered
held, in its own way, the spirit of our age as clearly as those Cubist-camouflaged trucks did in Stein and Picasso’s time.
Probably, though, you would have just thought: What could we even call such an unwieldy Frankentoy — a
swinger-totter?

Yamauchi decided the guy was either a genius or an idiot. Miyamoto was twenty-five, ancient by Japanese standards for a starting
employee. Nintendo gave him a desk in the planning department and put him to work trying to fix the dying video-game business.
At which point Shigeru Miyamoto made history. (And made Yamauchi Japan’s richest man.)

For most of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Sony Corporation in Tokyo dominated the business of console
computer gaming. Every few years dominance passed from one firm to another with a lurid and expensive jolt. Nintendo, Miyamoto’s
company, had briefly commanded the sector in the mid-1990s, but it had long since been flattened by its Japanese rival. The
business was lethal and very lucrative. Home video gaming, which had effectively been the province of hobbyists a couple of
decades before, had grown to such a size that hit titles regularly generated more profit than hit movies. Over the course
of its four- or five-year life span, a successful console such as Sony’s PlayStation 3 would deliver billions to the firm
that developed it. Even for Sony, which had many lines of media and electronics businesses, a successful console game had
a meaningful impact on profits. To lose dominance would be a disaster.

By 2006 console games were producing astonishing levels of realism. Whether you were playing a hand-to-hand combat simulation
or a version of football or basketball, the seamless graphics that appeared on your television and the (invariably loud) surround
sound gave you the sense of living inside the games, a long way from whatever living-room couch or dorm-room bed you were
actually inhabiting. Sony and Microsoft (the cash-rich computer software company entered the console business in 2003) spent
hundreds of millions of dollars to custom-build graphics processors capable of performing several trillion calculations per
second. These chips were so expensive that Sony and Microsoft lost money on each console, even at prices approaching $600
a box; they planned to make up the difference by collecting royalties on games.

In anticipation of several additional generations of power computing and the arrival of high-definition television, Sony and
Microsoft were investing tens of millions in new chips and hardware. All of this made it particularly surprising when, in
mid-2007, a new gaming system that used much older graphics technology — technology a full two generations behind Sony’s bleeding-edge
PS3 and Microsoft’s Xbox 360 — came more or less from out of nowhere to dominate the console business, reducing Sony to a
distant, gasping, and surprised second place and shaving billions of dollars from the firm’s market value. What was perhaps
not a surprise was that this system came from Miyamoto’s lab in Kyoto.

* * *

Starting with Donkey Kong in 1981, Miyamoto had become the reference genius of the video-game business. He had developed some
of the most popular arcade games in history and delivered billions of dollars in revenue to Nintendo. In 2001 he invented
a device called the Nintendo DS, an electronic push-button game that was about the size of a pack of cards and that quickly
became attached with near-ubiquity to the palms of Japanese and American teenagers. But, and this was significant because
it showed just how widely Miyamoto’s work could spread, the DS was also beloved by an impressive number of adults. In fact,
the best-selling game on the DS was a program called Brain Age, which flashed images and puzzles on the small screen, all
designed to help people keep their minds lubricated as they aged.

Miyamoto jokes that the secret to his genius is a “wife-o-meter,” which measures how much his wife likes what he is making.
The more willing his wife is to have his work in the house, Miyamoto thinks, the more he must be on to something. She never
would have used one of the handheld pure-gaming devices that Nintendo’s competitors were churning out for adolescent endorphin
junkies. But the DS intrigued her, and that intrigued him. Miyamoto sees himself as an artist. And, like many artists, he
wanted to touch on forces deep enough in society that his work would appeal to everyone — even his wife. Sony and Microsoft
were obsessed with chip speeds and frame rates and displaying millions of colors. Miyamoto was interested in a different sort
of power. “Too many powerful consoles can’t coexist,” he concluded. “It’s like having only ferocious dinosaurs. They might
fight and hasten their own extinction.”

Sometime after the turn of the century, Miyamoto turned his attention to the console gaming business. As he considered all
those dust-free rooms of engineers with their black plastic boxes stuffed full of powerful hardware, he concluded there was
a flaw in their logic. Of course, faster graphics chips were important to hard-core gamers, but Miyamoto thought that was
just a small slice of the world that could be using consoles. It was a slice that didn’t, for example, include Mrs. Miyamoto.

More than anything, this rebellion against what his competitors were doing was an instinctive twitch for Miyamoto. For Nintendo,
however, Miyamoto’s twitches meant multibillion-dollar gambles. (In fact, much of his success came from the fact that he was
surrounded at Nintendo by executives who were brilliant at ensuring his dreams
worked
in reality.) When the gaming press heard that Nintendo was cooking up something radical, they bombarded Miyamoto with questions.
It must involve some superchip, they speculated. They asked, “How fast will the new Nintendo machine be? How many images can
it render in a second, how much power does it use?” Miyamoto didn’t answer. He knew the questions were irrelevant. “We’re
kind of in a strange period where power is the crux of whether or not something is going to be successful,” Miyamoto told
them. “That seems a little bit odd. If we rely solely on the power of console to dictate where we’re going with games, I think
that tends to suppress the creativity of designers.” Many of those listening thought Miyamoto had finally lost his grip. The
man who had so famously created those hangers had, they thought, just looped a noose around Nintendo’s neck.

In fact, there
was
an innovative chip inside the new Nintendo system. But it hadn’t come from some geek-stuffed gaming chip design house. It
had come, instead, from inside an automobile air-bag system very similar to what you have in your car. The chip was a small
silicon tab called an accelerometer, a breakthrough device that could measure the most minute changes in direction and speed.
In your car the chip is programmed to notice the sorts of changes that would be associated with an accident — sudden jerks,
wild skids, the instant snap of collision. When it senses these radical changes, it fires off the air bags in a carefully
planned sequence. But the best of these chips, the most advanced, could measure smaller and more nuanced movements. This entranced
Miyamoto. Would it be possible, he wondered, to combine one of these chips with the hand-held controller of a video-game system?
This could transform computer games from a button-pushing exercise into real, uncontained physical activity.

It took Nintendo four years to get the accelerometer to work. Nintendo’s software engineers, who wrote the first games for
the machine, had to develop ways to translate human movement into virtual action. But once they had, it was frankly amazing
what the devices could do. If you swung the new Nintendo controller like a tennis racket or a baseball bat, the accelerometer
would record the movement, and a virtual figure on your screen would swing as well. You could hold two controllers in your
hands and jab them back and forth as if you were boxing. You could lean back while holding the controller and “bowl” it right
at the screen, as if you were flinging a ball down a bowling alley. You could shoot arrows with it, conduct a virtual symphony
(as Miyamoto once did at a conference, wearing white tie and tails). What you could not really do was stay seated, as you
would have with a traditional game. In order to get the accelerometer moving, you generally had to move yourself. Air bags,
after all, don’t fire off in parked cars very often.

As all this was under way, word of Miyamoto’s thinking leaked out of Kyoto. He was mocked. Professional gaming commentators
complained that the system’s graphics were weak. The whole point of gaming was to continue blurring the distinction between
reality and game. All those frustrated mothers who wondered why their sons spent hours playing virtual soccer but not a minute
on a real soccer field were an expression of an unquestionable axiom of the video-game business: gamers were
couch potatoes.
When Nintendo announced the name of its new system — Wii — the cackles turned into guffaws. The experts at Sony and Microsoft
reminded journalists that there was a reason their machines had sci-fi-sounding names like Xbox 360 or PS3. When Nintendo
introduced Wii at a convention in the summer of 2005, the crowd offered only a stunned, perplexed silence. “It was,” recalled
Miyamoto’s boss, Nintendo’s CEO, Satoru Iwata, “as though the audience didn’t know how to react.”

Consumers did. Within weeks of its introduction, Wii became a hit. It rapidly overtook those expensive Sony and Microsoft
boxes, eventually surpassing both in total sales. And because the Wii console wasn’t based on ludicrously expensive technology,
Nintendo was able to sell it for less than half the price of an Xbox and make money on each console. In homes in Japan, the
United States, and Europe — those homes lucky enough to actually lay their hands on Wii, which generally had a waiting list
of several months — owners cleared space in front of their TVs, pushed their couches out of the way instead of sitting on
them, then jumped, crawled, and flailed around with their Wiimotes. Wii killed the idea that a video game was something you
played without breaking a sweat.

As if to hammer this point home, Nintendo introduced an exercise version called the Wii Fit. If you didn’t know better, if,
say, you worked for Sony or Microsoft, you might have thought the Wii Fit was some sort of elaborate joke: an
exercise system
designed for fat, out-of-shape gamers who only let go of their remotes to open a bag of potato chips? What next, a dating
service? In fact, the Wii Fit, which involved a small platform on which you could jump, twist, and bend, became an instant
best seller. Large numbers of women starting buying Wii, a first in the thirty-year history of console games. Miyamoto had
demolished the wall between real and virtual, eroded the idea that the world was split into “gamers” and “nongamers,” and
forced his competition to completely rethink the whole idea of a game, of what they were doing when they came to the office
every day. And how had he done this? Well, this was why the Wii mattered for reasons important well beyond the world of tweens.

In technology circles there is a word for what Miyamoto made with Wii: a mashup. He had “mashed up” two seemingly unrelated
things — an accelerometer and a video game — to create something new. And in our revolutionary age, the mashup is a sign of
a different landscape of power, more or less what Cubism was one hundred years ago. If the Cubist revolution demanded that
we look at one thing from multiple perspectives, mashup logic demands that we look at the world as multiple objects mixed
in multiple — unpredictable — ways to create totally new objects or situations. Earl Gray, an American environmental scientist,
calls this “the new math,” an expression derived from experiments he’s performed in which chemicals separately have no effect
on the body but mixed together create a toxic, cancerous result. Gray calls these cases “zero plus zero equals something.”