At Nintendo's official Wii reveal to the European press at ExCeL in London's Docklands at the beginning of September, the company furnished a hangar-like space with 60 Wii consoles running tasters from games slated for launch, or soon after. It was a confident, well-orchestrated, successful event.
As is convention for all such presentations, each demo unit was overseen by a Nintendo company representative eager to help curious guests find their way around what was being shown - a particularly important consideration, you'd think, with a piece of video gaming hardware as defiantly different as this.
However, attending to the interests of journos from broadsheet newspapers, lifestyle magazines and dedicated gaming publications wasn't the expected procession of young, skinny, shiny girls offering helping hands. Instead, Nintendo had just hired… well, just a bunch of people. A woman in her 50's who claimed to have never touched a videogame before was demoing Konami's Elebits. A short, stocky man in his 30's was helping those who wanted to learn more about HudsonSoft's Wing Island. These "regular" people, hired from an agency that specialized in delivering "regular" people, were going to be responsible for introducing to the press the most innovative concept videogaming has seen since virtual reality first raised its angular, slightly ridiculous-looking head in the early "90s.
Why? Because these "regular' people are Nintendo's ultimate target audience for Wii. And who better to show what the comsole is all about, goes the thinking, than the people whose lives it's intended to change?
If it succeeds in doing so, it won't be via gaming, and, I begin to look at why, building a clearer picture of perhaps the most fascinating product ever to have emerged from Nintendo's Japanese labs.
The Wii Game Plan
How Will Nintendo's new console redefine gaming? And what challenges will it face?
At the Edinburgh Interactive entertainment Festival, attendees were set a quiz, a come-on-let's-see-how-much-you-really-know-about-gaming challenge devised by a renowned industry analyst. Among the questions was this: Which is the the odd one out among Sony's PSP, Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Nintendo's Wii? The answer was Nintendo's Wii, because apparently, it's the only one of the trio lacking multimedia aspirations. Yes, Nintendo's Wii, which connects to the internet out of the box. Which has its own dedicated weather and shopping channels. Which wants to remain perfectly connected to Nintendo motherbrain via WiiConnect24.
Nintendo's newest entertainment system has been frequently misunderstood ever since it debuted to selected press behind closed doors during the Tokyo Game Show "05. This, it turns out, is the problem with being different.
In this respect, Wii has followed the path laid out by DS, which at first sight appeared to show Nintendo as a company was clutching the straws. Here the handheld console whose feature set looked like a jumble of ticked boxes entirely lacking in coherence. It didn't help that launch titles such as Super Mario 64 DS made no attempt to demonstrate how a piece of portable gaming hardware could make harmonious, meaningful use of Wi-Fi connectivity, a two-screen display, an onbaord microphone and touchscreen sensitivity. It was only later with the appearance of games such as Nintendogs and Brain Training that the DS vision crystallised. With 21 million worldwide sales in the 22 months since, and with leadership over Sony's PSP - once clearly earmarked as the platform that would bring Nintendo's ages-old domicance of the handheld gaming market to an end - solidly established, it has become clear that new ways of thinking, and perhaps as importantly the confidence to execute on that thinking, can still bring about wild success, even in an industry that has, in recent times, allowed itself to become too processed, too watered-down, too reluctant to take risks.
Nintendo has taken two big, specific risks in designing Wii the way it has. The first is the most tangible: its primary, accelerometer-powered control system, consisting of the analogue stick-druven Nunchuk allied to the more complex Remote. Not all of the console's applications are designed to make use of both, of course, but it is when the two parts of the puzzle are working in tandem that Wii's absolute dedication to changing the way we play marks it out as something that earns it the Revolution moniker it once bore.
There is no question that, in terms of functionality, it works, and with a preciseness you aren't expecting from a piece of such inexpensive technology. The lag that has been evident in certain PS3 tilt-sensitive Sixaxis game demos, for example, simply does not exist. (It may not exist in those PS3 apps, either, once they're finished, but the Wii Remote has worked all along.)
