Iwata Tennis, golf and baseball were the only three sports in the version of Wii Sports that we announced at E3. Now bowling and boxing have been added and there are five sports to choose from. Could you tell me about this development? Eguchi The primary reason was the fact that Wii Sports is a product that will be sold worldwide. As you just mentioned, it was already determined from the start that tennis, golf and baseball would be included in the package. Tennis and golf are sports that are enjoyed around the world, but it concerned us that baseball isn't very big in Europe. At first we thought that three sports provided enough variety to allow anyone to enjoy the game. However, in countries where baseball isn't normally played, there would effectively be only two sports to choose from. So we realised that the game needed more variety, and we started thinking about other sports that we could add. Shimamura We were trying to think of sports that are known throughout the world that most people have played before. We also wanted to add sports that even mothers, who might not play sports very often, would want to try out. This led to the idea of bowling, and as usual we had the programmers make us a demo right away. (laughs) They worked on it for a few days, and when we had a chance to try it out everyone fell in love with it as soon as the ball started rolling down the lane. So, we decided to go ahead with it. Eguchi Around the same time, a plan was also put together for boxing, another sport that is enjoyed around the world. Since the Nunchuk and the Wii Remote are both going to be included with Wii, it's possible to hold one in each hand, and we started working on it so we could try this idea out. Honestly speaking, we were only going to use either bowling or boxing depending on which one turned out better. But once we had made some progress on the prototypes, we realised that we had created two games that worked so well that we couldn't choose between them. We got a little ahead of ourselves and joked about saving one of them for Wii Sports 2, but in the end these games were so good that we wanted to get them out to the public as soon as possible. We also felt quite strongly that we wanted to tell the world right away how much fun they could have bowling and boxing on Wii. So we ended up asking the programmers and designers to go ahead with both of them!
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