97 million Wiis have been sold around the world. For the DS, that sales figure is 152 million units. By most commercial standards, the bulk of this past generation has belonged to one company – Nintendo. Wii maintains a lead of nearly 30 million over its console counterparts. The DS family has double the sales of any other modern platform. And yet, when you qualify these accomplishments as a success, the publisher’s global president, Satoru Iwata, deflects the praise.

Nintendo's new generation has arrived.

At the heart of Wii U - the GamePad.

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"I always and strictly tell Nintendo employees never to use the term ‘success’ to describe our own performance," Iwata said in e-mail correspondence with IGN. "If we call a result of any of our efforts a ‘success’… we might apply it as the standard for success for future projects as well, and we could wind up not trying to do better than that or not making something which is very different in nature."The pursuit of new and bold avenues of entertainment is nothing new for Nintendo – or any video game company, for that matter. Holding such a strict personal standard of humility is pretty remarkable, particularly in the face of a never-ending race for hype, marketing and PR. But perhaps it offers a considerable amount of perspective into Nintendo’s philosophy behind Wii U. While Wii U retains many of that system’s signature traits, including the controllers, general console design and even the name, Nintendo’s sixth generation is defined more by its dual-screen innovation versus anything its predecessor achieved. In other words, as successful as Wii turned out to be, Iwata and his global team refuse to stand still in an era of motion control.But that’s Nintendo for you. It creates two of the most successful video game systems of all time, with the DS barely trailing Sony’s PlayStation 2, and refuses to overtly congratulate itself. It shocks the industry with Wii’s divergent strategy, and then tucks that startling success into its back pocket and heralds the arrival of asymmetric, social gameplay. Why?"[Nintendo] aims to create something better than what is already available in the world," Iwata said. "We believe this can happen by creating something unprecedented. Since Game & Watch and NES, all the Nintendo hardware has been developed consistently under this philosophy."This continual quest for perfection through discovery means that these days Nintendo rarely does what is expected, sometimes to the shock and dismay of even its greatest fans. The eras of the Nintendo 64 and GameCube symbolized a Nintendo that innovated in software only, taking incremental and somewhat obvious steps in its hardware. Now, the company has pushed its hardware to achieve the same – and what results is rarely what observers know what to do with. The reaction to Wii’s controller, even its name, echoes what has been said about Wii U in the past year and a half.And Iwata isn’t surprised."The brand new user interfaces that Nintendo invented often faced skeptical views before a hardware launch, but wound up becoming de facto industry standards,” the executive noted. “It is challenging to communicate attractions which are hard to understand unless you actually touch and experience them yourself. This is especially so with Wii U because it has unprecedented entertainment potential."Nintendo’s legacy of divergent hardware and software innovation is so ingrained in its practices that at this point it’s almost natural for the publisher to deliberately avoid what other companies are doing, even at the risk of completely ignoring industry-defining practices. Take some of Nintendo’s choices with Wii U. Despite achievements, trophies and system-based voice chat being expected by millions of core gamers around the globe, Nintendo didn’t follow suit. It would be easy to assume that Nintendo is simply blind to gamers it hasn’t aggressively courted in half a decade, but Iwata doesn’t see it that way."We have not thought that offering the same features that already exist within other online communities would be the best proposal for very experienced game players," Iwata told us. That’s a bold statement to make, as over 70 million Xbox 360 and 70 million PlayStation 3 owners would probably beg to differ. Yet rather than do what Sony and Microsoft have already done remarkably well, Iwata’s teams are focusing on creating a social community embedded into the heart of its new system. Wii U may lack a proper party system for friends, but millions of its owners can connect, interact and share strategies. Previously that was something almost entirely exclusive to the realm of sites like IGN. In the mind of Nintendo though, creating that network was important."Nintendo has paid a great deal of attention to the dynamic of people playing video games together in the same room," Iwata said. "With Wii U, we thought about expanding this concept into separate rooms which are connected online. Miiverse is a network community dedicated to video games that represents a very unique game-dedicated social graph that has never existed before."It’s worth stating the obvious - any omissions by Wii U’s operating system might not always be there. The Xbox 360 has changed radically since it first shipped seven years ago, altering not only its visual design considerably, but incrementally building in features that are now simply taken for granted, like support for 1080p output, game installations or simply running a game once it’s loaded into the system. Iwata says that "advancements and improvements" will continue to evolve Wii U’s experience from now on.Evolution is certainly something that already defines Wii U, and it has since day one. Just prior to launch, Nintendo confirmed that much of its new system’s functionality would not be present until an Internet-based update was downloaded. This is something that Iwata notes is a fairly familiar process in today’s industry, but regrets the fact that Nintendo’s brand-new console needs this for some fairly basic applications. "Personally I think that users should be able to use all the functions of a console video game machine as soon as they open the box," Iwata told us. "So I feel very sorry for the fact that purchasers of Wii U have to experience a network update which takes such a long time, and that there are the services which were not available at the hardware’s launch."