Nintendo President To Keynote Game Developers Conference

Organizers of the 19th annual Game Developers Conference (GDC), to be held in San Francisco from March 7th-11th, have confirmed that Nintendo president Satoru Iwata will give a rare keynote speech at the event. The talk is entitled “The Heart of a Gamer”, and in it, Iwata will apparently assess where the games business stands today, predict how it will develop over the next several years and the manner in which it will help decide future Nintendo hardware and software development. Iwata, now Nintendo's top executive, but with game credits that include the classic character Kirby, as well as the popular Earthbound and Super Smash Brothers series, will also discuss the strategic thinking behind the development of the Nintendo DS - touching on how designing games based on understanding gamers' emotional reactions to interactive gameplay will play a major role in Nintendo's future plans. The keynote page on the Game Developers Conference website also notes that Iwata will discuss how these 'emotional reactions' "will also play a major role in the nature of Nintendo's next console, code-named Revolution." The keynote speech is scheduled for Thursday March 10, from 10:30 am to 11:30 am in the Grand Ballroom of Moscone West. Further information can be found at the GDC 2005 website. [The conference is organized by CMP Media – the owners of this site and publishers of Game Developer Magazine.]