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!
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.
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.
Great video! I feel like there are still a few questions which were left unanswered, and I want to encourage further discussion:
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?
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?
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?
Making this heavily of an animated and visually interesting video at 12 minutes is insane in the space. Great work!