This morning I spent an hour in a New York City hotel room with Nintendo senior managing director/producer/game designer Shigeru Miyamoto to discuss the U.S. launch of Wii Fit and what it means for Nintendo and the games industry in general. (You can read an excerpt of our chat right here; the rest will be appearing in an upcoming issue of EGM.) I returned this afternoon to take part in a larger press roundtable, where he discussed the development of the Wii's most unconventional game yet and fielded more questions.

While much of his speech was material that's already available in Nintendo's Iwata Asks interview series, the Q&A session offered some intriguing insights. Below are some of the more interesting tidbits Miyamoto had to share with us:

On casual appeal through simplicity:

"With Wii Fit, the way we designed the game is similar to how we designed Wii Sports -- trying to provide the consumer with something that is easy to pick up and easily accessible and gives them the type and variety of experience they're looking for. The point is to make that experience intuitive and easy, which is why we've included a Wii Fit Channel that's downloaded from the disc to the Wii menu that allows you to quickly go in and, without even having the game disc inserted, to do your body check on a daily basis."

On Wii Fit concept approval:

Miyamoto compared the initial skepticism over the viability of Wii Fit as a product to development of "the DS hardware itself. In the process of developing the DS, for a very long time there were a number of people who continued to think that it was not the best idea! But I think currently at Nintendo we have a very good balance between people who have been there for a long time who may be very conservative about what we should be focusing on, and people who are younger and newer and are more excited about trying new things. I think we've managed to create a good balance that leads to interesting discussion."

On Wii Fit DS connectivity:

"We were working on a product like [a DS application that allowed calorie tracking], but the problem we ran into with designing for a worldwide audience is that it's difficult to keep track of all the different foods people around the world have eaten. We also talked about trying to incorporate some form of DS connectivity. We've designed it in a way that by potentially upgrading the Wii Fit Channel we could add upgrades that would allow us to add that kind of functionality... It's even possible a third party could create a fitness game that would be able to read your saved fitness data."

On whether this means Wii Fit will be updated for online functionality:

"Nothing I can talk about today." (Subtext: Wait for E3.)

On localization, or lack thereof:

"Generally I don't think about different countries for the games I'm working on. When I'm trying to develop a game, I develop gameplay to evoke feelings that are common to everyone regardless of where they're from.

"That being said, with Wii Fit it is true that Americans tend to be bigger than Japanese, particularly when it comes to their feet! So early on in developing the balance board we found a rather large American named Reggie to help determine whether the prototypes were big enough for his feet and make changes based on that. Beyond that, there was changing kilograms in Japan to pounds in America. And in fact in the UK, they use 'stone,' which was very strange to me. Really, there's not a lot of changes between the versions.

"Also, in Japan the Wii Fit box says the Balance Board is rated to 136 Kg, or 300 pounds, whereas in America it's rated to 330 pounds, which is 150 Kg. You'd think the board was made stronger for the U.S., but in fact Japan has a little-known law where manufacturers have to submit their scales for government approval. At the time the standard was 300 pounds. Since America doesn't have that law, we're able to state that it can hold 330 pounds despite the fact that the Boards are exactly the same! When you're performing certain actions like jumping and squatting you're putting extra pressure on the board, so in fact it's able to withstand considerable more weight -- probably about 600 pounds."

On peripheral proliferation:

"I think game design that strives to improve the user interface is going to continue to be very import, and we focus very heavily on experimenting in different areas. But one of the concepts behind the Wii hardware was that we wanted it to be a device that belongs in the living room but wouldn't be in the way or clutter up the room. So we don't want to create too many peripherals! Still, we're always experimenting, so it's possible we could come up with something... but we're not actively trying to create anything at the moment."

On other uses for the Balance Board:

"[Balance Board support in other games] will depend on how well Wii Fit sells in America and Europe! But just looking at how many have sold in Japan already opens up the possibility of... well, maybe not a Mario game that requires the Balance Board to play it, but certainly one that takes advantage of it."