Nintendo confirm they are looking to adopt HD

November 6, 2009 by Alex Seedhouse
Filed under Previews

It would seem that Nintendo are well aware of a revitalised demand for High-Definition gaming, with Shigeru Miyamoto stating “We probably cannot swim against the tide. The customer’s tastes will become more and more refined. Even today, many customers who have seen HD once say they cannot go back to SD.”

Genyo Takeda, Manager of Nintendo’s R&D department, added that his team had been looking into “many different things, including HD and SD”. Whilst the company was in no position to make any official announcements, they were certainly investing a move into HD to accomodate consumer demand. Takeda continued, explaining that “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. Since the ordinary TV programs are now shifting to HD, moving to HD appears to me a natural flow.”

Miyamoto did show concern to the fact that such an immediate move to HD would cause an increase in development costs, maintaining an opinion that it should be down to the developers whether they design games for SD or HD displays; “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.”

However in complete disregard to this information, within Gametrailer TV’s Nintendo episode Reggie Fils-Aime (President for Nintendo of America) immediately dismissed Geoff Keighley’s query regarding the fact that industry analyst Michael Pachter still expects Nintendo to reveal a new Wii HD console, with the response of “I don’t know how forcefully we can say that there is no Wii HD.”

I guess we’ll just have to wait and see then…!