SAN FRANCISCO — Nintendo gaming guru Shigeru Miyamoto and his top designers had a heck of a time making Wii Music, and he admits that they didn't quite nail it. Now Nintendo is having a difficult time selling the somewhat inscrutable Wii Music to gamers hooked on *Guitar Hero *and Rock Band.

Released a week ago, Wii Music hasn't been the sort of lightning-hot hit that Nintendo was hoping for. Although it topped the Japanese game sales charts, it sold fewer than 100,000 copies in its first week. Now Nintendo must figure out how to sell a music game that's not about getting a high score.

"Anybody who has played it has responded very positively to it," said Miyamoto (pictured above, far right) to about a dozen members of the videogame press in a hotel conference room here Oct. 23. "One thing that I'm really struggling with is, what did we do in creating *Wii

Music *that made it so difficult for people to understand until they actually get their hands on it?"

That question never did get answered.

*Wii Music *was the first game that Nintendo ever showed publicly for Wii: Miyamoto kicked off the console's grand unveiling in 2006 by playing the game's orchestra-conducting mode in a tuxedo. But it took Nintendo years to finish the game, which it released last week to mixed reviews and slow sales — an uncharacteristically slow start for a much-hyped release on the white-hot console. In the time between that first peek at Wii Music and now, rival titles have established the ground rules for what a music game is, and it's not clear that Nintendo's offering will catch on like the company's other big hits, Wii Sports and Wii Fit.

Wii Music is a cousin of Wii Sports, Wii Play and Wii Fit. It is the most inscrutable of the four, the weird black sheep of the family. Wii Sports

makes sense instantly: Hand someone a Wii remote and serve them a tennis ball, and odds are they'll return it back to you on the first try.

Likewise, in Guitar Hero, if you strum the guitar at the wrong moment during a song, you hear an agonizing squelch and lose points. In Wii Music, the game attempts to make every button-press pleasing by inserting harmonic grace notes into the song's melody. Add in the game's 60

different virtual instruments, and you can see how many options you have for changing the way the tunes sound.

*Wii Music *does penalize you for playing badly, but it penalizes you with cacophonous music. The challenge is not to complete the song "perfectly" — it's to create something that sounds nice by artfully arranging your playing style and choosing complementary instruments. Aside from a few snags in the process, it works. The problem is that it's hardly pick-up-and-play.

Even though Rock Band is considered to be a hard-core game and Wii Music a casual one, Rock Band is arguably far more of a pick-up-and-play experience. Sitting someone down in front of a Rock Band

drum set and tell them to hit the red drum when the red button lights up on the screen is much easier to understand than saying, "OK, take this controller, hold it like you're sitting at a piano, then tap out a jazz arrangement of 'Happy Birthday.'"

During the Wii Music design process, Miyamoto, the legendary creator of Super Mario, learned that putting first-time directors in charge of a huge game is far from the path of least resistance, and that games that never give you a "game over" screen aren't necessarily easy to pick up and play.

While any videogame writer worth his salt would kill to get an audience with Miyamoto, the round-table discussion was more of a lecture. Questions were restricted to Wii Music only — no asking the man about his 30-year legacy of hit games at Nintendo — and the entire first hour of the 90-minute session was a one-way presentation in which Miyamoto ran down the bullet-point list of features in Wii Music, something any PR flack could have handled just as easily.

The goal was clear: If getting people to grok Wii Music truly means getting them to play it first, Nintendo has a massive Catch-22 situation on its hands. Short of mailing out free copies to every Wii owner, the best Nintendo could do was to lure journalists into an educational session hosted by Miyamoto in hopes of generating detailed reports about the product's features.

"I'm hoping that all of you will help get the word out that it really is a game that you need to play to understand," Miyamoto told the group.

Miyamoto has a personal stake in* Wii Music*, as it is something that he has wanted to create for a long time. The first time I ever interviewed him, in 2003, I asked why he, an accomplished guitar and banjo player, had never made a music game.

"We're not intentionally avoiding making music games," he said at the time. "We have such good music composers here, and I often say to them, 'Why don't you come up with a great music game rather than always trying to attach music to the games that others are making?'"

That's precisely what Nintendo did with Wii Music. The game's director, Kazumi Totaka, has been with the company since the 16-bit era, but as a music composer, not a director. Miyamoto must have imagined that Totaka's great success as the musical wizard behind Animal Crossing would have translated perfectly into being able to design a music-oriented game.

This did not turn out to be the case. "I thought it would be a pretty natural progression (from composer to director)," Miyamoto said, "but what we found in the process was that it was difficult."

A musician's job, said Miyamoto, is to "explore the depths" — add more songs to the game, add more parts to the songs and create as expansive and grand a scope for their work as the game will allow. But a game director's job is the exact opposite, he says.

"It's very important for the director of a game to be able to take his thoughts and ideas and distill them down into a way that you can explain to other people, and have other people understand what it is you're trying to achieve," he said. "I think that's something that perhaps is difficult to do if you don't have a lot of experience.... I thought that because we'd been working together for so many years, it would be a little easier than it was."

Wii Music's development troubles are evident just by a glance at the credits. Not only did Totaka have three "subdirectors" working underneath him from more traditional game design backgrounds, there were three producers stepping in to supervise the work — Wii Sports' Katsuya Eguchi, Super Mario's Takashi Tezuka and Miyamoto himself.

Miyamoto says he looked to Tezuka — his right-hand man ever since the first Legend of Zelda in 1987 — for feedback on Wii Music, though not for the reasons you might expect.

"[Tezuka] knows absolutely nothing about music and cannot play music whatsoever," Miyamoto said. "I was keenly watching how he responded to Wii Music, and whether or not he, who was not musically inclined, would think it was fun."

What Miyamoto and his crew of experts were attempting to create was a music game that broke away from the Guitar Hero mold. While Miyamoto says he enjoys playing traditional music games, he likened the experience of having to stick rigidly to the melody to being in a "cover band" that simply copies other writers' songs.

"Cover bands can only get so far, and if, as a musician, all you do are cover bands, you really won't develop. It's when people break out of that and start making their own music, bringing their own creativity to song creation ... that really makes music fun for people."

Part of the reason that Wii Music spent so long in development, I am sure, is that Miyamoto and crew did all they could to ease players into the experience. The game's much-maligned song list was chosen, Miyamoto said, because the designers wanted to find songs that as many people as possible already knew by heart, and ones that could be arranged in a variety of ways.

"We were looking for music that had a very high degree of freedom to allow people to arrange them in a way that would allow them to express themselves," Miyamoto said. "We weren't able to go with more popular music, because what you find with popular music these days is that the progression of the song is very much tied to chord progression. And when you are so tied to chord progression in your song, the harmony and the melody then become one, and it becomes more difficult to break away from the original composition."

That's why you're playing "Daydream Believer" and "Do-Re-Mi" in Wii Music. But future editions might be centered on contemporary music or even videogame tunes, mused Miyamoto.

Wii Music topped the Japanese game sales charts last week, but sold fewer than 100,000 copies, which is low for a high-profile Nintendo title that has the full brunt of the company's massive marketing machine behind it.

It's not fair to compare Wii Music's sales potential to Wii Sports or Wii Fit, says Wedbush Morgan Securities analyst Michael Pachter. "Wii Sports is free, so of course everyone liked it." And Wii Fit's balance board, which works with a variety of other games, makes it more of a "platform" than a mere game.

Pachter does think that the casual audience will buy Wii Music even if the hard-core audience will find it "too simple." He estimates that the game will sell 2 million copies in the United States this year, and from 500,000 to 1 million annually starting in 2009.

Miyamoto shrugged off the Japanese sales numbers at the round table, saying that it was about what Nintendo expected. The company is clearly crossing its fingers that Wii Music's hidden strengths will propel it to strong sales as more people discover what it is all about.

"In my mind, if you're the kind of person who taps your hands on your desk when you're listening to music, or humming to the song, you'll find this game interesting," Miyamoto said.

Photo: Chris Kohler/Wired.com, game screen courtesy Nintendo

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