How some impromptu push-ups in front of Miyamoto shaped the Wii Balance Board

- Game designer and longtime (former) Nintendo staffer Motoi Okamoto, reminiscing with Gamasutra about his work on Wii Fit.

Did you know the Balance Board, which wound up earning a Guinness World Record for "best-selling personal weighing device" (likely because it was bundled in with hits like Wii Fit), was originally more of a Balance Square?

That's one of the many little bits of Nintendo development trivia that Entersphere founder Motoi Okamoto recently shared while chatting with Gamasutra about the nearly ten years he spent at the company.

It's a good read if you're at all interested in what it was like to work at Nintendo EAD at the turn of the millennium, but Okamoto covers so much ground -- everything from his initial work as a programmer to his contributions on games like Super Mario 64 DS, Pikmin, and Wii Play -- that his anecdote about doing push-ups in front of company treasure Shigeru Miyamoto is easy to miss.

"Early in [Wii Fit's] development, the Wii Balance Board was square-shaped, just like an ordinary bathroom scale. But one day, when I demonstrated the push-ups game using a scale in front of Miyamoto, he smiled broadly and said, laughing, 'Okamoto, who doesn't exercise, is trying to do push-ups. This is hilarious.'" recalled Okamoto. "This is how the square-shaped balance board became oblong, to accommodate a man's shoulder width, so players could use it for push-ups."

You can read the rest of Okamoto's anecdotes about his time at Nintendo, which include his initial surprise at how old-fashioned the company was, even in 1999 ("All employees had to submit a daily report on paper every day, in 1999, when each of us had a PC on our desk!") in our full interview.