Nintendo Scores with Brain Age Video Game in Japan

NEW YORK (Wall Street Journal) Nintendo's Brain-Training Game
Targets Older Players
By GINNY PARKER WOODS
February 23, 2006; Page B1

KYOTO, Japan -- Japan's hottest videogame is about to hit the U.S. --
and it doesn't involve shooting or racing. Rather, it's a bunch of word and
math problems with a distinctly no-thrills title: Brain Age: Train Your
Brain in Minutes a Day.

The idea came two years ago, when Nintendo Co. President Satoru Iwata
read a book by a Japanese neuroscientist that explained how to keep the mind
sharp with simple math problems. Mr. Iwata made a pilgrimage to the author's
office at a university in northern Japan and asked him to collaborate
on a videogame.

The scientist, Ryuta Kawashima, invited a team of Nintendo programmers
to his lab. For five months, they attached electrodes to the heads of test
subjects, who played with a prototype puzzle game. Then they used Dr.
Kawashima's brain-imaging technique to determine which drills
stimulated the mind the most.


The resulting game, played on a hand-held machine, is Nintendo's latest
effort to expand the crowded global videogame market. Rivals Sony Corp.
and Microsoft Corp. are bringing out games and consoles with faster, more
vivid graphics, which tend to appeal to experienced gamers. But Nintendo is
trying to make videogames that will appeal to people who have never played
them before.

"We have to get nongamers into videogames," says Mr. Iwata. "To do
this, we have to completely change the nature of game play."

Overseas success is crucial for Nintendo, because it typically reaps
about 75% of its revenue outside Japan. Long the market leader in portable
game machines, Nintendo must now also contend with Sony, which last year
launched its first portable game device, the PlayStation Portable. The Sony
console can play movies and has a more vivid screen than Nintendo's portable
machine, making it ideal for showing off fancy graphics. The PSP has
sold well, especially in the big U.S. market.

Nintendo's key weapon is a device called the Nintendo DS -- short for
"dual screen" -- hand-held game machine, which was introduced in late 2004 in
Japan and the U.S. The machine opens like a book and has two screens.
One is touch-sensitive, so players can write on it with a stylus. The other is
just a regular screen. The DS also has a microphone for voice activation,
and networking capability so that users can send messages and play against
each other from afar. Last week, Nintendo announced that it would soon
enable Web browsing on the device using an add-on card.

Simpler than most other videogames, Brain Age flashes questions on one
screen, while the player writes answers on the other. The player is
peppered with a series of timed drills, allowing the game to measure the user's
"brain age." Twenty is the best, because that's around the age at which
most people's brains are fully developed but still agile.
[The Nintendo DS is currently sold out in Japan because production
cannot keep up. Most users find they are much "older." But by working through rounds of
exercises -- complete with coaching by a bespectacled, cartoon version
of Dr. Kawashima -- players can bring down their brain age and chart their
progress over time. Nintendo, citing Dr. Kawashima's research, claims
that playing Brain Age improves the memory and helps stave off the mental
effects of aging.

Indeed, scientists have shown that training older people in specific
cognitive "domains" -- such as memory, information-processing speed,
reasoning or "executive" functions such as juggling multiple tasks and
planning -- improves their performance in that specific function. Brain
imaging has shown that, after just a few weeks of training, the pattern
of activity in older brains actually starts to look like that in younger
brains. The benefits of training appear to be limited to that specific
ability, however, and do not transfer to other tasks, so improving
short-term memory won't necessarily make an older brain better at
multitasking, for instance.

In Japan, the brain game has been a surprisingly huge hit. Since its
introduction in May 2005, the $25 game has sold 1.8 million copies, and
ranked within the top 10 videogame titles in all but two months,
according to research company Enterbrain. A sequel that came out on Dec. 29 has
already sold over 1.5 million copies.

What's more remarkable is the type of customer: Around a third of the
people who buy games in the brain-building series are over 35, and another
third are between 25 and 34. That's a big shift from the teenagers who
typically purchase Nintendo's software. Many of these older gamers have lined up
to buy their first machines in order to play Brain Age, and the DS is
currently sold out in Japan because production cannot keep up.

"I always thought that games were a waste of time," says Masaru Imazu,
a 40-year-old Tokyo office worker who purchased the software during his
lunch break recently. "This actually seems useful."

The challenge for Nintendo now is to make the idea work in the U.S.
In Japan, brain-sharpening exercises were already popular when Brain
Age came out, helped by Dr. Kawashima's books and TV appearances. The game
then helped fuel a boom in brain-exercise products, like a Sharp Corp.
calculator that comes loaded with math drills. Doctors have even begun placing DS
machines loaded with the games in their waiting rooms.

"It makes people feel like their time is being used efficiently," says
Hitoshi Ueda, an administrator in the office of a plastic surgeon in
Kyoto. "Whether or not it really works, it's fun for the patients."

Analysts say it's unclear whether this trend will catch on elsewhere --
especially since a large part of Nintendo's success is due to the local
celebrity of Prof. Kawashima. Japan "is a smaller market where Nintendo
has much more weight in marketing, and more of an opportunity to create a
boom from nothing," says Credit Suisse games analyst Jay Defibaugh.
Elsewhere, "it's more of a challenge."

The version of the game that will go on sale in the U.S. on April 17
will include counting, memory and reading drills, as well as sudoku, a
Japanese number puzzle that has recently become popular in the U.S. and Europe.
Another brain-exercising quiz game will come out in May.

Nintendo plans to run ads for the games during daytime television and
in magazines that attract older readers, like Time and Readers Digest. The
company will test the product in retirement communities in North
America.

The company has just announced a sleeker, lighter version of the DS.
This will come out in Japan in early March, though a U.S. launch date has
yet to be announced. Nintendo has also launched other game titles for the DS
that stray from shoot'em-up and racing. One is Electroplankton, a game in
which players compose ethereal music by manipulating cute sea creatures on
the screen. In another title, Nintendogs, which has been a hit globally,
players raise and train a virtual pooch. The DS's wireless networking allows
different owners' puppies to virtually play with each other.

Nintendo is also lining up a new console that it hopes will draw more
new people to videogames: The Nintendo Revolution. Planned for release
later this year, this device seeks to free game playing from the conventional
keypad controller. Sitting or standing before a screen, players hold a
controller in one hand, sweeping their arm or twisting their wrist. The
Revolution senses the player's movement and position in space.

The company hopes this will appeal to people intimidated by all the
buttons on conventional game controllers. One target audience: the parents of
today's gamers.