Games Industry Wire

In an interview with IGN, Mike Capps, President of Epic Games, has publicly stated his disdain for Nintendo’s hit console. You might have read about other Epic executives saying not so good things about the Wii and this time is no different. God, I wish Miyamoto would shut these guys up for a change.

IGN: Everybody does! Bring it out at parties and everyone’s like, “Oh it’s a Wii!”
Capps: Part of it’s being cheap. I think it’s a, I mean, so two things: first of all, great credit to them. The first time I played a videogame with my parents – aging myself a bit – was on Atari 2600. The next time I played a videogame with my parents, 25 years later or whatever, was Wii Tennis. So it’s about bringing people together, families, Thanksgiving, all that. I think it’s kind of like a weird virus because I have not yet found a reason to play with my Wii since then.

IGN: Exactly. For a real gaming experience…
Capps: Right, Zelda I really didn’t enjoy on it. They back-fitted the control scheme on it, it was better on the GameCube. Mario, I wish there had been a button instead of wiggle and all that kind of ****. So I haven’t played anything that I really wished hadn’t been on another platform sadly enough. It’s a virus where you buy it and you play it with your friends and they’re like, “Oh my God that’s so cool, I’m gonna go buy it.” So you stop playing it after two months, but they buy it and they stop playing it after two months but they’ve showed it to someone else who then go out and buy it and so on. Everyone I know bought one and nobody turns it on. Obviously there’s a class of people who really love it and enjoy it and are getting into the games but I’m still waiting for that one game that makes me play it. Who knows, maybe Wii Fit will be it.

IGN: Wii Fit’s pretty fun.
Capps: Is it?

IGN: At last year’s E3 everyone was hatin’ on me for saying it was gonna be good. But sure enough, it is.
Capps: Well everything they do is good!

IGN: Yeah, oh yeah. And everyone hates it at first. “The Wii?! Motion-sensitive controllers? What the hell is that?”
Capps: I know, the name. We all say Wii now and never even think about the name anymore. They know what they’re doing and they make money better than anyone else does. As an investor you love ‘em, but as a next-gen console technology maker, they don’t run UE3 and they can’t.

IGN: Is there any chance that Epic will ever, is there going to be a point where there are too many Wiis on the market for you guys to not make a game for it?
Capps: No, we go forward, not back. It makes more sense for us to invest in the next-generation tech. There have been shops that have done it. Red Steel was a launch title and that was on Unreal Engine. So it’s been done. How you take an engine that’s all based on shaders and materials and run it on hardware that doesn’t support shaders is just impossible. It’s about as easy as PSP for us. Maybe it would make sense, but it makes more sense to invest going forward.

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