How were Miis created?

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Really well done video! Also very interesting and informative, thank you. It's kind of sad to see Miis being put to the side in the way that they are now after all of this.

👍︎︎ 13 👤︎︎ u/goddamnlids 📅︎︎ Dec 14 2018 đź—«︎ replies

Very interesting stuff, crazy how it took 20 years for a project and several iterations for a project to become a hit. There's an anecdote for perseverance somewhere in there.

On a side note, the content on your channel looks pretty promising, I look forward to seeing more of your research.

👍︎︎ 7 👤︎︎ u/Crohnite 📅︎︎ Dec 14 2018 đź—«︎ replies

Great video! I feel like there are still a few questions which were left unanswered, and I want to encourage further discussion:

  1. You mentioned that Miyamoto wanted to make the character file sizes as small as possible so that they would fit in the Wii remote's internal storage (TBH this is the first time I've heard of Wiimotes having storage). But what I don't quite understand is why he wanted to do this. What functionality did Miyamoto originally envision these stored Miis having?

  2. I understand that Miyamoto's kokeshi doll project and the SPD team's "lucky laugh" face building game eventually transitioned into the Miis we see today, but I feel that there's still a "missing link" in the timeline. Miis are interesting in how ubiquitous they are. They have been found in an insane amount of games since the Wii era. Sometimes they are playable characters, sometimes you observe them in third person like in Tomodachi Life, and sometimes they just make cameos in other Nintendo franchises, like appearing in the background of certain Mario Kart tracks. But how did Nintendo settle upon following this approach, i.e. ditching the original games as Miyamoto and the SPD team envisioned them and instead using them as these ubiquitous player avatars? What was the decision chain like?

  3. It's impossible to talk about Miis without talking about Wii Sports, the game that came packaged with the Wii console, in which the only playable characters were Miis, and even features them on the box art. How closely was the development of Wii Sports tied in with the Miis? Or did the developers originally plan to use some other characters for the game, and then later switch to Miis?

👍︎︎ 5 👤︎︎ u/Burritozi11a 📅︎︎ Dec 15 2018 đź—«︎ replies

Making this heavily of an animated and visually interesting video at 12 minutes is insane in the space. Great work!

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/STTskipthetutorial 📅︎︎ Dec 14 2018 đź—«︎ replies
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Hi there! So Nintendo have a knack for creating characters that stick. Mario, Bowser, Link, to name just a few. But in the early 2000s, Nintendo stumbled upon a new set of characters that become iconic in their own way - the Miis. However, the journey to where they are today was a long and arduous one. And one we’ll be exploring! Let us journey through, The development history of Miis. The year was 1986, 3 years after the Famicom was released in Japan. Nintendo were launching a peripheral for the console, called the Famicom Disk System, that allowed it to read floppy disks. Of course, Nintendo would need some games to put on the disks, so developer Shigeru Miyamoto set about coming up with a brand new game. After thinking up some possible concepts, he settled on the idea of a game where the player could draw their own face, or the faces of others. Miyamoto named this project the “make someone you know” project, and before long, a quick prototype was put together: As you can see, there was a lot of customization available. The player could move each part of the face all around and put it wherever they wanted. The art style was also quite realistic, at least in 8-bit terms. And, The player could even use these characters in short animations using something called the Scenario Disk. Excitedly, Miyamoto showed this demo to his colleagues at Nintendo. However, the response was ...lukewarm. According to Miyamoto, they told him, “How could this be a game?” And so the “make someone you know” project was put on hold. Fast forward 13 years to 1999, 3 years after the N64 was released, and Nintendo were launching a new peripheral for the console, called the N64 Disk Drive, which would allow the console to read games from disks. Deja vu, anyone? Again, this new peripheral would need some games, so off Miyamoto set! As a sort of successor to the SNES game Mario Paint, it was decided that Nintendo would develop of a range of art related games, called Mario Artist. There was Mario Artist: Paint Studio, Mario Artist: Polygon Studio, and crucially, Mario Artist talent studio. This Talent Studio game was heavily modelled around Miyamoto’s Famicom prototype - players could again create custom characters and again, create animations with them (albeit far more advanced ones). However, unlike his earlier prototype, this game was actually released! Was it a huge success? Ehh, not really. Colleagues at Nintendo were again doubtful that this character creation tool was a real game, and that it would interest players. Sales too were unsurprisingly low. The N64 Disk Drive only sold about 15,000 units, so there simply wasn’t a sizable customer base to buy the game. It looked as though the “make someone you know project” would die along with the disk drive… Then, around 2002, a new hope appeared for Miyamoto’s project - Nintendo’s handheld Console, the Gameboy Advance was receiving 2 new peripherals - the Nintendo e-reader, and the GameEye camera. Now Miyamoto could create a game where the player imported photos taken using their GameBoy advance onto their GameCube console, where they could be used as the face of a character. Phew, complicated. With this idea fresh in his mind, Miyamoto set up a team to turn this idea into what would become the GameCube game Stage Debut. And at E3 2002, a demo of the game was shown off! As you can see, the game was looking pretty close to completion, so it would no doubt be released soon afterwards, right? Wrong. Again, his colleagues were dubious - they thought it was entertaining, sure, but didn’t think it could be turned into a full game. Begrudgingly, Miyamoto agreed, and his game was cancelled yet again. Fast forward a few years, and planning for the Nintendo Wii was taking place. Great, thought Miyamoto, another chance to create his game! Reflecting on some of his past attempts, he realised that they had all been quite complex. When working on Talent Studio, for example, the team had gotten carried away with all the possibilities of a character designer, so they included realistic looking facial features, manga style facial features and comic book style facial features too. Far too many. And the whole process of transferring images from the GameEye camera to the GameCube for Stage Debut? Yeah no, that was faaar too complicated. He decided this game needed to be much simpler and more accessible to the average person. That wasn’t the only reason to simplify the game, either. You see, Miyamoto had an idea for his characters. An ambitious one. He wanted them the be transferable to the Wii Remotes, where they could be carried around. But to fit a character inside the Wii remote, its file size would have to be tiny. Because of this, the characters would have to be quite simple looking. Around this time, he renamed the project to the “kokeshi concept”. Kokeshi are small, wooden Japanese dolls with round heads and cylindrical bodies, and they were to be the basis of Miyamoto’s simpler characters. And so, Miyamoto gathered a team of people to finally turn his dream into a reality, and work began! Meanwhile, over in another part of Nintendo, a different team was hard at work developing a prototype for a new DS game. It was based on the traditional Japanese game of fukuwarai, which translates to lucky laugh. It’s basically pin the tail on the donkey, but with a face rather than a donkey’s butt, which is, in my opinion, highly preferable. However, the team realised that with the current facial features they had, it might not be possible to recreate the face of their boss, Yoshio Sakamoto. In response, Sakamoto personally told them, “make it so you can make non-normal faces like mine!” The team were discussing how it would look like him if the nose was larger, the mouth was bigger, the eyes were droopier and so on, when an idea came to mind. What if the player was able to change the facial features’ sizes and rotations! Designer Mai Okamoto stated, “As I was designing the parts, I hadn't even thought about changing their sizes at all, so I added on that new feature with doubts in my mind. But when I used it to make a caricature, it looked really good, and I thought if it worked this well it had to go in.” The team tried out their software with the faces of many people at the company, and it worked strikingly well! It was easy to recreate almost anyone’s face! The team’s boss, Sakamoto showed the demo to Nintendo president Satoru Iwata, who was really impressed. It instantly made him think of Miyamoto’s kokeshi doll idea, so he went to tell Miyamoto about it. Miyamoto was taken aback. Upon trying out the prototype, he realised it was exactly how he had imagined his idea! He went back to his own team, and told them “You guys are useless!” After showing Miyamoto the prototype, Iwata called a meeting with many of Nintendo’s higher-ups, where he showed them the game too. Not just the game, but also the countless caricatures the team had made of unwitting Nintendo workers. Thankfully, everyone in the meeting received their caricatures well! So, Miyamoto decided he was fed up with his own team, so he brought everyone who developed the prototype over from Nintendo SPD, the part of Nintendo that develops smaller, weirder games, over to Nintendo EAD, which develops Nintendo's flagship series like Zelda and Mario. No pressure. Their boss Sakamoto told them “think of it as part of your training!” From there, a lot of delicate tweaking was needed to get the game ready to run on the Nintendo Wii. Developer Hisashi Nogami described this process as “walking on a very thin line.” They didn’t want to lose what made the original prototype special, after all. Early on, Nogami noted that they would have to raise the graphical quality quite a bit. Small DS screens a lot more forgiving than large television screens. One major issue the team ran up against was Western Civilisation. Well, more specifically, the difference between western and Japanese faces. You see, early on, the team made a caricature of one of Nintendo’s American executives. When Satoru Iwata showed him the face during a visit to Nintendo’s US headquarters, it was a big hit! Because of this, the team thought that they were covered, as far as Western faces were concerned. Their game could create Japanese and Western faces alike, right. Mhmm All of that changed, however, some time later. Some European and American Nintendo executives were coming to visit Japan, so Shigeru Miyamoto asked the development team to create caricatures of them. Miyamoto took the faces to the meeting with them, but afterwards, returned with his tail between his legs, telling the team, “they didn't like them at all...” Why the difference? Well, developer Ryutaro Takahashi thought it was probably because the first caricature was made using the DS prototype, whereas the later faces were made using the Wii version. Now the DS version’s graphics weren’t very high quality, so the player’s brain had to fill in a lot of the details on its own. The Wii version, on the other hand, was much clearer. Any part of the face that wasn’t quite right stood out really easily. Hmm. They were going to have to have to fix this. Okamoto asked everyone she knew at Nintendo of Europe and Nintendo of America to send over photos of themselves, which she could use as a reference. Hisashi Nogami asked all the Westerners he knew to give their opinions on the faces, later remarking “I studied a lot of faces. I remember seeing noses that were completely different from those of any Japanese person!” Once word got out that the team were adding new facial features, requests began coming in for specific features to be added. At first, there were just a few, but it became a flood of requests from all across the company. However, Takahashi knew that they couldn’t just blindly follow the requests, stating “there is no single part that would resolve everything. If we answered to all the requests for new parts, there just would be too many parts.” Plus, the characters had to fit onto the wii remote, so there there was an actual limit on how large they could be. Eventually, Okamoto had enough, responding to requests with “"I won't make that part because I don't think we need it.” And so the team finalised the facial features. No more. Now it was time to test. Feedback from Japanese people was positive, but what about non-Japanese people? Well, according to Nogami, “That seemed positive too! I heard that at one of our European subsidiaries, the staff were playing around making a face that looked like their boss. He caught them and got really angry at them! It seems it was too close to his real face for his liking!” ---------- And so, on the 19th of November 2006, the Wii was released. I don’t think I need to point out how successful it was. It-it was successful. And the Miis? They went down a treat, becoming a Nintendo icon for over a decade. Now, I think Shigeru Miyamoto can sometimes be a little idolised; he is only human, after all. But, as well as having a ton of talent, he is unbelievably perseverant. The journey from his original idea to the finished Miis took 20 years. Which is crazy. But, I think it was worth it. I love a good mii. Hi there! Thank for so much for watching to the end. So, as indicated by the seasonally appropriate background music, it’s almost the end of the year. Ahhh, I can’t believe we’re almost in 2019! So anyway, regardless of what you do or don't celebrate, I just wanted to thank you. These past 3 months have been so much fun, and now this channel has 1000 subscribers, which I still can't quite believe. Thank you so much! And on that note, I’ll see you in the new year. Byeee!
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Channel: Thomas Game Docs
Views: 1,703,777
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: gaming, miis, mii maker, Shigeru Miyamoto, behind the scenes, How It's Made, Nintendo, DS, Wii
Id: CJq8ZuDAikI
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 12min 3sec (723 seconds)
Published: Thu Dec 13 2018
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