Move to HD is likely, says Nintendo

By Ellie Gibson Published 6 November, 2009

"We cannot swim against the tide."

Nintendo's top execs have confirmed the company is looking at moving into high-definition gaming, suggesting such a shift is inevitable.

"We probably cannot swim against the tide," said Shigeru Miyamoto, speaking during a recent press conference. "The customers' tastes will become more and more refined. Even today, many customers who have seen HD once say they cannot go back to SD... When the majority of people around us say it is OK, we are content with the situation."

But a move to HD will incur an increase in development costs, observed Miyamoto - which means it will come down to the type of software developers are producing. "For example, we have to ask ourselves if HD is really necessary to develop Wii Fit. Won't HD be better for the games like Pikmin? The developers should choose the most appropriate graphical format depending on the software they make."

R&D manager Genyo Takeda said his department has been looking into "many different things, including HD and SD". He said they're not in a position to make any announcements yet, but things are heading in a HD direction.

"Since an increasing number of the TV sets at home around the world are becoming HD today, it will be natural for a machine to be able to generate graphics that people will be accustomed to see on HD televisions," Takeda said. "Since the ordinary TV programs are now shifting to HD, moving to HD appears to me a natural flow."

Marketing exec Shinji Hatano added, "If 24 kilo bytes of NES software can fit into 200cc tea cup, you will need enough water to fill a 25 meter swimming pool in order to make full use of a PS3 disc because the memory size of a game software has increased 2.25 million times as large as an early NES game." Thanks for that.

Picture of Ellie.

About Ellie Gibson

Since joining Eurogamer in the mid 2000s, Ellie has written about subjects as diverse as the fall of Gizmondo, the rise of Hollyoaks actresses in Red Alert games and the noise a bear makes under NSFW circumstances.

Read more articles from Ellie by visiting the Ellie Gibson archive page.

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Comments (45) Latest comment 2 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • chukcyQ #1 2 years ago

    Why the hell would Nintendo want to swim against the tide??? "For example, we have to ask ourselves if HD is really necessary to develop Wii Fit." Don't ask yourselves, ASK THE CUSTOMERS.

  • chukcyQ #2 2 years ago

    "If 24 kilo bytes of NES software can fit into 200cc tea cup, you will need enough water to fill a 25 meter swimming pool in order to make full use of a PS3 disc because the memory size of a game software has increased 2.25 million times as large as an early NES game."

    ... Ok, so what? Nintendo wants to drink tea?

  • jamhead #3 2 years ago

    If they move to HD and retain BC with the Wii/Gamecube library I would be tempted, depending on how much the 'upgrade' to HD would cost. If it's the equivalent of a DSi remake then I might not be able to bring myself to do it.

  • Widge #4 2 years ago

    "but we can fucking try"

  • Lukree #5 2 years ago

    Obviousmobile stuff. Welcome to the future!

    But at least they aren't claiming that they are already HD as some other software companies say even when they aren't...

  • wizlon #6 2 years ago

    Storm in a NES in a teacup! WiiHD confirmed!

  • bad09 #7 2 years ago

    Christ. Ninty finally gets a few games to convince me to invest in another Wii and then start talking HD, oh well money saved I guess :)

  • Dan234 #8 2 years ago

    If they're suddenly aware of HD TVs, Does this mean they'll update Virtual Console games so they won't make many HD TVs barf with their, um, esoteric, 240p output?

  • Ignatius_Cheese #9 2 years ago

    Gotta love that quote from Shinji Hatano!! :D

  • JohnnyWashnGo #10 2 years ago

    But but Reggie just denied the existence of WiiHD... http://ww w.vg247.com/2009/11/06/reggie-t...

  • Ignatius_Cheese #11 2 years ago

    "Don't ask yourselves, ASK THE CUSTOMERS."

    Surely Nintendo have been observing consumer trends and sticking to them fairly well to amass the sales they have? I don't think they have a problem of not asking the customers, more that they are not asking the core gamers. And core gamers tend to go hand in hand with early tech adopters. I'll shut up now...

  • Antaios #12 2 years ago

    Go HD, don't go HD, it doesn't really matter if you're not putting out great games.

  • Darren #13 2 years ago

    I think Nintendo need to seriously focus on delivering plenty of excellent games rather than HD personally. At one time I'd have been excited about the prospect of playing a new Mario, Metroid Prime or Zelda game in HD but not so much now as the Wii has been a real disappointment IMO, failing to deliver anything decent and noteworthy games wise for almost 18 months now and even before then it was hardly dripping with triple A games.

    The move to HD for Nintendo though was inevitable anyway as technology always moves forward, never backwards, even if people don't want it because that newer technology is often the only thing they can buy anyway. For example, try going into a shop and buying a CRT TV now and you'll see that almost every 26"+ TV is at least HD ready.

  • Eighthours #14 2 years ago

    From that, we can deduce that Nintendo is planning the hilarious step of going HD for some games and remaining SD for others. They just don't get it, do they?

  • superdelphinus #15 2 years ago

    Most of the evidence to date though points towards HD uptake being nothing like as quick as people expected/ hoped

  • RobTheBuilder #16 2 years ago

    I have never understood why Nintendo didn't use an (cheap) HD upscaling chip to generate a 720p output from the Wii.

  • markymark22 #17 2 years ago

    Welcome to 2009/10 ninty. Ps3 and 360 have been doing this for 3 and 4 years respectfully. And your 'looking into it'...! The sales must be dropping on 'super party waggle woggle balloon pop family party fun swingy swing game 4'! Time to step into the current generation.

  • chrisjm #18 2 years ago

    ..waits for the 'new ways to see' line of remakes.

  • schnide #19 2 years ago

    Translation:

    "As casual gamers start buying HDTV's, they're noticing the Wii looks shit and we won't always be able to get away with it."

  • TheChieftian #20 2 years ago

    "I have never understood why Nintendo didn't use an (cheap) HD upscaling chip to generate a 720p output from the Wii."

    I've never understood why people would want this, your HD tv does this anyway when it displays the wii's SD output.

  • zedzee #21 2 years ago

    This is the MOST DEFINITE indication by Nintendo staffers that they're going to bring out an HD model of the Revolution (I'm sorry, but I can't bring myself to call their console by it's official name) very soon.

    No matter when though, they're right. If they release an HD version, it will very much be a storm in a tea-cup...

    Over & Out.

  • Alterego-X #22 2 years ago

    @ JohnnyWashnGo:
    "But but Reggie just denied the existence of WiiHD..."

    Holy shit! Reggie confirmed that they won't make a HD version of their current generation console, and Miyamoto confirmed that their next generation console will be HD.

    Contradiction? I think not!

  • Bremenacht #23 2 years ago

    Gah! Pikmin!

    He only mentioned it to tease all those people who are gagging for a new Pikmin game.

  • MENTAL1ST Verified Senior Software Engineer, Picsel UK Ltd. #24 2 years ago

    Surely Nintendo have been observing consumer trends and sticking to them fairly well to amass the sales they have?

    Apart from their current Wii sales slump, that's being attributed to the almost total lack of AAA Core games for the past year or so.

  • MENTAL1ST Verified Senior Software Engineer, Picsel UK Ltd. #25 2 years ago

    we can deduce that Nintendo is planning the hilarious step of going HD for some games and remaining SD for others

    If you'd been reading the Digital Foundry articles on the site, you'd be well aware that's effectively what PS3 and Xbox 360 do. A good few 'HD' games don't manage as high a resolution as 800*576 PAL widescreen.

  • MENTAL1ST Verified Senior Software Engineer, Picsel UK Ltd. #26 2 years ago

    I have never understood why Nintendo didn't use an (cheap) HD upscaling chip to generate a 720p output from the Wii.

    Because such chips are anything but cheap*, which is why the £425-at-launch PS3 doesn't have one.


    *despite what David Dickinson would have you believe.

  • Razorus #27 2 years ago

    About bloody time Nintendo. I have been preaching the Gospel of HD for ages now, it makes sense. By the time the next-gen comes around, HD implementation will be cheaper. Nintendo's Innovative Gamplay + HD graphics to rival Sony and Microsoft = Regaining respect from the hardcore crowd and gaining support from 3rd party developers x New Epic Zelda in High-Definition Glory. Simple Maths.

  • Fab4 #28 2 years ago

    "We cannot swim against the tide."...only because you havent brought a controller for it, surely? ;)

  • SG #29 2 years ago

    TheChieftian
    06/11/09 @ 10:30

    "I have never understood why Nintendo didn't use an (cheap) HD upscaling chip to generate a 720p output from the Wii."

    I've never understood why people would want this, your HD tv does this anyway when it displays the wii's SD output.

    Uh... does this mean my TV is outputting the Wii at 720p? o_O

    Mentalist(air)
    06/11/09 @ 11:04

    I have never understood why Nintendo didn't use an (cheap) HD upscaling chip to generate a 720p output from the Wii.

    Because such chips are anything but cheap*, which is why the £425-at-launch PS3 doesn't have one.


    *despite what David Dickinson would have you believe.

    But PS3 outputs 1080p, and pisses all over the Wii's technical capabilities in other respects, e.g. HDD, CPU, GPU, blu-ray, etc.
    Edited by 1 at 06/11/09 @ 11:22

  • Darren #30 2 years ago

    By the way the Xbox 360 doesn't have a dedicated scaling chip either, the upscaling is done completely by the Xenos graphics chip. Any half-decent graphics chip can do upscaling, it doesn't really require a dedicated chip in a games console. They're typically included in DVD players and TVs because they don't have graphics chips like games machines.

    Also I don't think upscaling Wii 480p games without AA to 720p would make them look much better than they do already upscaled by HDTVs. The image quality will still be poor IMO. What is needed is something similar to how Xbox 360 runs Xbox games, where it upscales 720p games and adds extra AA but even then the results are mixed. I don't think the Wii's graphics chip can handle AA without severe compromises to the visuals. It would require a much more powerful graphics chip, in which case it would be doing native 720p anyway, ideally with AA.

  • Chazmeister #31 2 years ago

    "If 24 kilo bytes of NES software can fit into a single rabbit dropping, you will need enough bloated bullshit to fill up a large dumper truck in order to make full use of a PS3 disc."

  • MENTAL1ST Verified Senior Software Engineer, Picsel UK Ltd. #32 2 years ago

    By the way the Xbox 360 doesn't have a dedicated scaling chip either

    Yes it does, here's a picture of it:

    http://ar stechnica.com/gaming/news/2007/...

    You're right in that it plays no part in upscaling Xbox 1 games, that's done via High-Level-Emulation, or HLE as also used by the infamous UltraHLE N64 emulator that could render Zelda OOT's razor-sharp polygons at whatever res your monitor could handle. But what it does do is scale Halo or COD4's sub-HD arbitrary-resolution picture to full HD res with no overhead for the GPU.
    Edited by 1 at 06/11/09 @ 11:55

  • Malek86 #33 2 years ago

    "We cannot swim against the tide."

    Isn't that what they did when they launched the Wii? And it paid off.

  • TheChieftian #34 2 years ago

    "Uh... does this mean my TV is outputting the Wii at 720p? o_O "

    If your tv is 720P native res then yeah, kinda of. It's probably outputting the wii at 1280x720 50 or 60fps.

    If your tv is 1080P then it converts the wii output to 1920x1080. This won't make it look any better though, upscaling doesn't really improve image quality

  • makeamazing #35 2 years ago

    The problem here, as mentioned in the article is that they will need to release a HD machine, but then they have to make some HD games to go with it... that is firstly costly, and secondly time consuming. So i wonder if they have even started to consider making their games in both HD and SD right now? Probably not.. so they will launch a machine without much HD gaming (and lets be honest it wont be the same cost)... why would you buy a Wii HD for games (with the obvious lack of games issues) when the Xbox and Ps3 have massive catalogs and will probably be about the same cost.

    If I was them, i would consider leaving if a good few years, and jump in just before the Xbox and Ps4. They have really missed the point imho.

  • Shakey_Jake33 #36 2 years ago

    @SG - Your TV will have it's own native resolution. For most HDTVs, this will be 1280x720, 1366x768 or 10920x1080. No matter what you connect to your TV (PS3, Wii, NES, whatever), your TV will automatically rescale it to it's native resolution.

    By putting a scaling chip in the console itself, you are merely getting the console to do the scaling instead of the TV. It's not changing the game's resolution itself into HD, just doing the scaling job so your TV doesn't have to.

    In fact, depending on your TV, you might even end up scaling the game twice, if the console is scaling the game to 720p, and the TV itself then has to scale to it's own resolution. This is not ideal.

  • MENTAL1ST Verified Senior Software Engineer, Picsel UK Ltd. #37 2 years ago

    The issue with scalers is that TVs only accept certain resolutions as input, regardless of whether they know they'll have to rescale it afterwards. Halo 3 renders at 1152x640, but there's no '640p' standard resolution, so the console hardware needs to scale it, either by more work by the GPU to produce a standard resolution like PS3 does, or by using a dedicated video signal processing chip like Xbox 360 does.

    All of this is entirely beside the point.

    The point is that Nintendo and speaking more and more about HD, which implies that a new, more powerful Nintendo home console looks like it will be on the cards sooner than a next generation of consoles from Microsoft and Sony. I'd say next Christmas at the earliest, but probably more likely between Spetember and December of 2011, with an announcement at E3 of next year.

    I would not be surprised if, like DSi, they try not to spook the current Wii audience by making it seem too different, so it'd probably be backwardly compatible, and use Wiimote+integrated Motionplus controllers.

  • TonyHarrison #38 2 years ago

    I must be missing something, the biggest critique of Nintendo's current direction from my esteemed fellow gamers is that they don't want to play games with "last gen" graphics.

    Now Nintendo say they are planning on embracing HD, and these very same people still say they don't want to play them.

    Does that not suggest that these people saying such things would never play a Nintendo game regardless of how many pixels it has, or it's quality? If it does, then why are these people even bothering to comment.

    BTW, this gen is not the HD era, until every game released is played in full HD resolution with excellent graphical prowess, we will not truly be in the HD era, especially whilst the likes of Activision are putting out COD games with resolutions barely better than that of the Wii.

    And yes, I'm aware that it's not just the resolution that matters and that it's far more complex than that, but it's the resolution that gets the most attention... So until we're getting the best we can in that regard, we won't truly be in the HD era...

  • cianchristopher #39 2 years ago

    Hi Donnie (aka Captain Hate080208)! Welcome back!

  • jambo74 #40 2 years ago

    For me the Wii is a letdown. No real quality games that make use of the system around.

  • DaemonSpawn #41 2 years ago

    Nintendo will make new console with the power of maybe Xbox 360 and backwards compatible with Wii. Hardware of that perfomance is dirt cheap now, maybe as cheap as Wii's so Nintendo will loose nothing while taking new install base. Maybe they even will continue to support current Wii with shit like Wii sports 11 (which will work on both consoles). Microsoft and Sony will inevitably have to move to new hardware generation (upgraded Wii will crush X360/PS3 even more), and hardcore crowd will follow.
    What's exactly new?

  • scouserfuller9 #42 2 years ago

    I couldn't care less if HD is not used. My favourite Mario game is Mario 64, favourite Zelda game OOT, favourite Metroid game is Super Metroid and favourite Starfox game is Starwing and look at their graphics!
    All I'm interested in is I'm playing a game I enjoy.

  • blanka #43 2 years ago

    It pisses me off when nintendo say things like it will cost more to develop software for the new console as HD is now a factor.

    LIKE DEVELOPING FOR Wii WAS THE MOST EXPENSIVE CONSOLE ON THE MARKET !

    As if that was ever the case and straight off the bat here we find them talking abt costs ALREADY ! Un belieivable this company is .... i mean they have by far the most successful set of products ever in any console generations by far and here we find them complaining abt costs going up for the new Ninety offering ! OMFG @ this company !!! I am SO NOT SUPRISED why I have had two Wiis so far and sold them both and two PS3s and kept them second one.

  • IronCladChicken #44 2 years ago

    @blanka
    Both Microsoft & Sony were warning of increased development costs as they were about to to release the 360 & PS3 respectivly - Nintendo were just making the same point.

  • robson_wii #45 2 years ago

    I would hope that a new console will be able to do software emulation of Cube and Wii (plus all other emulated consoles from VC) and simply scale correctly for output.

    I am planning on updating to HDTV within the next couple of years. I have a great 44" screen running component/progressive scan mode and games look fine when sitting a sensible distance from the console. I have enjoyed HD resolutions on my PC for a while but the game quality is far more important and I play a range of game styles.