Nintendo president Satoru Iwata, looking dapper in a leather jacket, took the stage at the Moscone Center at 9am Pacific time to deliver his keynote speech, “Discovering New Development Opportunities” to this year’s Game Developer’s Conference.

Iwata kicked things off modestly by rubbing the industry’s face in The Big N’s sweaty armpit like so much high school jock jerkwad.

• Global Wii shipments have topped 50 million – the “fastest selling video game hardware in history”.
• Nintendo the only platform holder who’s sales have experienced growth in the US and Europe – the competitors have remained essentially flat.

After a few talking points regarding rushed development cycles and the “death spiral” that accompanies them, he moved on to a series of of stories revolving around the nigh-mythic Shigeru Miyamoto.

Miyamoto, according to Iwata, sees game concepts where others don’t by drawing from human experience and distilling simple, everyday concepts down to the base essence of “What makes them fun?” As we all know, Pikmin, Wii Fit and Nintendogs arose from his interests in gardening, exercise and his family’s new dog, specifically – Iwata goes a step further, in telling us that not only is Miyamoto bound by the usual non-disclosure agreements regarding work, but he’s also under an NDA surrounding his personal hobbies as well. I suppose that will definitely keep the competition from picking his brain for new ideas before Nintendo can drop them.

Under Miyamoto, Nintendo has many small teams in action at the same time, all working on prototypes attempting to capture each concept. A video was shown of the Wii Sports boxing prototype – nothing more than crude rectangles and squares, being far more concerned with nailing the movement and fun factor than visuals. Trial and Error are his preferred methods of product refinement, sometimes lasting for years. This goes a long way towards explaining Nintendo’s famously long development cycles for in-house titles. Nintendogs and Super Mario Galaxy were both originally intended to be launch titles, but didn’t make the window. Wii Sports, however, did.

In one final Shiggy-story, Iwata tells us of how, years ago, Miyamoto had a habit of kidnapping random, non-game playing Nintendo employees and plopping a controller into their hands. Telling them to simply enjoy themselves, he would watch over their shoulders to see how somebody totally new interacted with the game.

After some insight into the development of Rhythm Tengoku (Rhythm Heaven over here), Iwata shifted back to the numbers game again.

• Last year, 47% of Nintendo DS owners were female.
• More third party titles sold for Wii than any other platform last year.
• The Wii Balance Board’s install base has almost caught up to that of the PlayStation 3 itself.

But we know the truth – you want news on new tech and games, right? Okay, fine.

Nintendo announced a storage solution for Wii – not the hard drive everyone assumed, but something almost as good and definitely a lot more portable. Coming in the Wii System menu 4.0 (which is available to download NOW, by the way) is new support for SDHC (high capacity) cards – up to 32GB each! Accessible via an SD card icon on the dashboard, not only does each card get it’s own 12 screen by 20 page menu like the Wii itself, but games can be launched directly from the card itself. Considering that a 16GB card can be had online for around $30 and a 32GB for somewhere around the $80 neighborhood, I’d say this is a pretty decent workaround.

New WiiWare titles were announced – Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life As A Darklord and Final Fantasy IV: The After Years – along with the original Final Fantasy and Final Fantasy IV coming to Virtual Console for North America. DSi titles teased were WarioWare Snapped!, utilizing the DSi’s camera and Moving Memo, a crude animation program. Also announced was Virtual Console Arcade, bringing back classics like Space Harrier and Star Force as well as titles less familiar to a western audience like Tower of Druaga.

Lastly, fans clamoring for the announcement of a new Zelda title got one, though maybe not exactly what they were hoping for. The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks is due later this year for Nintendo DS and features Link…driving a train? The Phantom Hourglass-styled game apparently centers on a mutation of that title’s sailing system. Definitely an odd note to close out the keynote on, but one that will most likely leave the industry talking, one way or another.