To answer the title... I did. 15 years ago.

It's general trend in the industry, that games are getting easier every generation. It's called expanding the market. Anyway it's not just Nintendo, but nice to see that someone at Shigerus position have guts to say it.
In practice, this means more focus on online multiplayer (reason why i don't fancy that much online multiplayer amped to every game). But this is what the industrys core audience (the so called casual gamer) wants. The point is, that single player mode don't mean the same thing as they used to, campaign mode starts being more like a tutorial for online play.

But let's wait and see, Nintendo has always been a master in developing games, that are easy to access and easy to play, but when you want to play the game 100% through, that has turned out to be really hardcore.

True, difficulty has been decreasing. But where does it stop? I don't want to be treated like I am some grandmother who only picks up the controller at Christmas.

Super Mario 64 definitely had more than a few difficult moments, as did Mario Kart 64. I owned an N64 for that generation, and I don't think Nintendo shied away from difficulty in their games. The more I play games like Wii Play, and Wii Sports, the more I am nervous about what Nintendo will do.

WarioWare is much better, if only for the fact that the game feels like a crazy salvia trip. I feel like the uses of the controller were far more creative too. I would just really prefer to see this casual pandering leave "real" games unmolested.

I couldn't agree more with you shams. NSMB is definately for both audiences seeing as I am in love with it and my gf actually wanted to try it. She NEVER plays games except for Tetris. But she played NSMB and Mario Kart DS [albeit sucking at it...lol].

I like Nintendo's stratedgy and their balance in idfficulty. I'm not worried at all.

EDIT: The only recent Nintendo game which I found pretty unbalanced in difficulty was Mario strikers Charged. I have never played a game that hard in my life.

First, this quote is painfully out of context. Miyamato said, in the same breath:

What I mean is that there is no point in making a difficulty level the fun factor of a game. We are making Super Mario Galaxy as a new and fun experience which aims at providing a very appealing, convincing and-before all-fun experience. If we managed to do so, then I'm sure even the core gamers will find it appealing.

It is important that people who are playing them feel that the games are indeed fun to play… Now there is this concept I always focus on, which is you have to feel the fun of a game by only trying it

Should it be fun by only playing it a short time, this indicates already it has a big value as a product… It is very important that the full fun of the game is being felt in the first stage 1-1.

And second, personally, I strongly agree with him. Does anyone else feel like "difficult" single player games are totally obviated at this point anyway?

If you're looking for difficult games, obviously you should look to multiplayer. Why would you ever want to face AI -- even reasonably good AI -- when you could play a highly experienced person? Or even a team of persons working together?

Simple truth: an expert Mario Strikers Charged player will present a greater difficulty level than 90 percent of the single player games available on Wii/PS3/360. And that's not even getting in to deeper multiplayer games like Starcraft or ones that feature complex team coordination such as CS or the upcoming UT3 for PS3/PC.

I remember reading that quote some time after E3, and didn't remember why I was so indifferent about it then, but curious about it now. Thanks Bodhesatva for reminding me of the rest of the quote (that evidently was the reason for me not being worried about it when i origianlly read it)

I agree about Mario Strikers Charged, that gets extremely hard extremely fast (almost to a point where it was less enjoyable, for me, actually)

This makes me a little sad, but as someone said earlier, games getting easier has been happening for a long time. The sad thing is that, in my opinion, this can't be solved by simply adding a hard mode or increasing the health of enemies. REAL (single player) difficulty is created by level design, and if you're specifically designing a level to be easy and accessible to lesser gamers, it can be very hard and time consuming (and even impossible) to make that level hard for us elite gamers.

That's not to say this is all bad news, though. Most games will do just fine without high levels of difficulty, but genres like shmups benefit a lot from their high level of difficulty. I guess that's why we see fewer shmups these days. :(

Sure, NSMB can please everyone, but would an easy Gradius VI? I'd doubt it. Yes, pick-up-and-play games are fun and for many games multiplayer is the best way to go if you're look for difficulty, but some games work best in difficult single player, and I hope they don't get pushed too far into the background.

I don't know what he's talking about, mario strikers is BLOODY HARD.

Although I must admit that Zelda TP was exceedingly easy. Much easier than Ocarina and even Wind Waker IMO. My girlfriend loved it though, she hates difficult games.

@ gameboy, galaxy will be very hard, it was delayed so miyamoto could make the game more difficult. He said in a video interview 2 ign :)

You guys complain yet I bet half of you couldn't even beat a fire emblem game if you tried.

And you call yourselves, hardcore.