The New Nintendo 3DS wasn’t originally designed with the handheld’s super-stable 3D technology in mind, CEO Satoru Iwata has revealed, with the technology shown to Shigeru Miyamoto just one week prior to the console being presented for manufacture by Nintendo’s engineers.
The tech left Miyamoto so impressed, however, that he questioned whether there was any point in manufacturing a new 3DS console that didn’t ship with the improved feature.
“I think you’re probably familiar with the tales of how, in the late stages of development, Mr. Miyamoto always upends the tea table,” Iwata told TIME. “So a similar thing happened this time. The hardware developers had designed a piece of hardware that they felt was at the final stage of prototyping, and they were bringing it to us for approval to begin moving forward with plans for manufacturing.
“But Mr. Miyamoto had seen that super-stable 3D just one week before, and he asked “Why aren’t we putting that in this system? If we don’t put this in it, there’s no point in making the system.”
Iwata says that he was repeatedly asked by internal engineers whether the firm was “really going to do this?”
“But Nintendo is a company of Kyoto craftsman,” he continued, “and what we don’t want to do, is if we know we can make something better, we don’t want to leave that behind. So we were able to bring the super-stable 3D to reality by looking technically at what we can do to solve those challenges and finding those steps along the way to make it happen. This is where my background in technology is quite helpful, because it means that the engineers can’t trick me.”
The New Nintendo 3DS debuted in Japan and Australia late last year before arriving in Europe and America in February.