Miyamoto’s “Health Pack” Realized: The Evolution of Wii Fit

Takao Sawano, who works at Nintendo with Shigeru Miyamoto, gave a great lecture on how Wii Fit came to be– it turns out it was “in the center of Miyamoto’s brain as a concept even before the console was released.”

Planted in the middle of Miyamoto’s Wii conceptual diagram (along with Wii Play and Wii Sports brainstorms) were ideas stemming from the fact that Miyamoto just enjoys measuring his weight and collecting the information. Of course, to make the product have wide appeal, there needed to be more to it, because who weighs themselves in the living room?

While the software team was taking care of that area, Sawano and his team were hard at work designing the peripheral that would become the Wii Balance Board. His idea to have two scales came from seeing Sumo wrestlers weighed that way, since one scale wouldn’t be enough to measure over 330 pounds. Not that we are all huge, but just that charting the weight shifting between feet could be an interesting way to proceed. He showed pictures of various prototypes, including raw shots of the strain gauges, of which there are four in the final product.

“Connecting the Wii Remote is a clumsy solution, don’t you think?” is how Nintendo President Satoru Iwata responded to their already heavily tweaked prototype when they first presented it. So much for cutting costs! Now the Balance Board is a self-contained wireless device. The decision to widen the board to account for a shoulder width stance during exercise also added more cost. Luckily it seems that since the game is selling so well in Japan (over 1.4 million copies since it was released last December) third parties may be interested in developing for the peripheral as well, so we’ll have more to do with our new toy. One such title already released in Japan by Bandai Namco in January is called Family Ski, which features a more fleshed out skiing game. Sawano rolled footage of a Japanese comedian having a great time while pulling off jumps and navigating moguls.

Wii Fit hits Europe April 25 and North America May 19. Might wanna start jogging around the block so the Miis don’t leave you in the dust on Wii Fit Island.