During a recent interview with Hideki Konno, group manager of the the Nintendo 3DS hardware project, sat down in an interview with Famitsu. Konno gave a bit of interesting information stating that the Nintendo 3DS project was never intended to have 3D in the first place.
Konno didn’t go too much into the specifications of the previous model, but basically said it lacked the 3D feature.
“I became involved with development starting in 2008, but at that time, it didn’t have 3D visuals,” he told Famitsu. “From Nintendo’s perspective, they’ve released ’3D Hot Rally’ (a Japan-only 8-bit game that used 3D shutter glasses) and the Virtual Boy; they’ve had a history of experimenting with 3D visuals. With this system, you could say the timing was just right for us. It was the right time to start thinking about using the latest in high-tech and try out glasses-free 3D. The technology we got to demo was really impressive, and starting in early 2009, we began to think that it was time to bring it to games.”
The original model even lacked the gyroscope and motion sensors. These were added on later when Shigeru Miyamoto thought that it wasn’t enough to just have 3D. He felt that it would really put the system over the top to add those features in as well. They put them in just before their presentation at E3 as to have a working and fully featured system.
Source: Link
Oh the things we learn. I wonder what would the Nintendo 3DS had been if they hadn’t added the 3D feature. It’s not unlike Nintendo to try to push the envelope, so this route almost seemed expected.
