Nintendo's president, Satoru Iwata, has said that Nintendo considered the approaches Sony and Microsoft have taken toward motion control and rejected them.
The
Financial Times reports that it was told by Iwata that "his company had made experimental games controlled by camera-based sensors, but got better results with the accelerometers it eventually chose to use for its Wii console."
Sony's wand controller uses optical location detection, while
Microsoft's Project Natal has no peripheral to hold at all - though there looks to have been some
trickery involved in the video demo released.
Iwata also offered the
FT some less passive aggressive, more modest words.
On building on the Wii's success, Iwata
said, “First, we never use the word ‘success’. When overseas subsidiaries put ‘success’ in draft releases we tell them to delete it.
“Also, there are things that we did through ability, and things that were luck. You know, Nintendo was lucky. I was confident that expanding the gaming population was the right idea, but to actually do it in three to four years was incredibly lucky.”