Nintendo’s Subtle Revolution
With all the buzz surrounding Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, Nintendo's next offering, codenamed Revolution, has barely garnered a mention.
Everybody was at the E3 party last week. Ol' Xmas box 360 had a lampshade on his head, wiggling Spice Girl style on the table. Sony was in the corner in a muscle shirt, trying to sweet talk the girls by bragging about what was under his hood.
Then someone asked, "anybody seen Nintendo?" He was fashionably late in typical "I don't care what the other guys are doing" style, looking very sleek in his new, understated, quiet confidence. But you know how the old pros are. With nothing left to prove, they just smile and let the kids play. Nintendo intends to make this a subtle Revolution.
"Our next console proves small in size but big on ideas," says Reggie Fils-Aime, Nintendo of America's executive vice president of sales & marketing, referring to Revolution, which has the thickness of three DVD cases, stacked together.
Nintendo is banking on a concept they're calling "All-Access Gaming," the key concept being the 20 years worth of downloadable Nintendo-all the way back to Mike Tyson's Punch-Out. And even better, they're thinking of offering the old games for free.
"It appears that Nintendo has not decided on a definitive model for this feature of the Revolution. Speaking last week, Shigeru Miyamoto speculated that they might not even be chargeable at all. The purpose of offering the old games for download was, he said, to encourage people to buy the console in the first place, and that the feature had not been conceived as a business model," as read in last week's press release.
The Revolution console will have a bay for an SD memory card, allowing players to expand the internal flash memory. Two disc formats will be supported from one disc slot-the current 12 cm optical discs and Game Cube discs. Owners will have the option to buy an attachment for playing DVD's. This feature, presumably, will keep the basic console below $200.
Now for what Revolution is packing. The system has 512 megabytes of internal flash memory, wireless controllers, two USB 2.0 ports and built-in WiFi access. Revolution's technological heart is an IBM developed "Broadway" processor and an ATI "Hollywood" graphics chip set.
Revolution will be released sometime in 2006.
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Jason L. Miller is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.
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