This Month in Nintendo History: December 2006
The hardware equivalent of gold dust for most of 2007
Few could deny that the humble GameCube had a hard life. The range of software the 'Cube had going for it ensured its library was no slouch, despite its aesthetic design, relatively lacking third party support and general image problems keeping it below the radar of many stores and gamers. The Electronic Entertainment Expo of 2004 was where everything began to change. Nintendo put on an impressive showing of GameCube and Game Boy Advance support (including that Zelda trailer), but it was the advent of Nintendo DS that would upturn the company’s fortunes. Sony entered the handheld market with PlayStation Portable, a stunning creation seemingly from the future that everyone and their gran prophesied would take over the handheld space and crush the comparatively ugly DS.
Upon release later that year in Japan, and early the next everywhere else, the DS didn’t exactly set the world on fire with its sales; the touch-screen was an interesting addition at a time when few other portable devices had a robust equivalent, and this, coupled with the device’s other oddities, ensured some purchases - but it wouldn’t be until the advent of three major events that sales of DS would really pick up. Nintendogs was Tamagotchi taken to the next level and a huge hit with people outside of the usual gaming spectrum, as was Brain Training, a title with a simplistic interface and premise, but which tapped into a market wanting games to be outwardly useful to everyday life instead of just blissful time wasters. A sleek hardware redesign into something resembling a beautiful Apple product certainly didn’t harm matters either.
Tiddles found the best way to annoy dogs without risking his face.
After these events, and a continuous barrage of quality software, DS began its ascent to a sales and popularity plateau that its successor may never equal. It also set a path for Nintendo to follow for their next home console as well; a focus on accessible quality software that appealed to everyone, not just die-hard videogame players of many years. At 2005’s E3, Nintendo took a different stance with the reveal of their next machine, choosing to show off only the sexy black housing of the then-named Revolution instead of the full (and slightly exaggerated) hardware demonstrations that Sony and Microsoft went for. Nintendo teased new details for upcoming Revolution titles like Mario and Smash Bros., but the only footage to come out of the conference in any relation was a short clip of what would become Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, in itself more of a teaser than a reveal. In fact, the most interesting disclosure of the conference was the final Game Boy revision and arguably the finest of them all, the tiny Game Boy Micro.
Yep, it’s really that tiny. And his hands are really that huge.
With the sudden sales behemoth of DS still fresh in their minds, Nintendo continued work on their new console behind the scenes. The first clear sign of the DS influence was at the Tokyo Game Show of 2005. Nintendo traditionally never attended this event with the same showcase effort as E3, but head honcho Satoru Iwata nonetheless took the stage for a keynote, and shocked the world with the reveal of the Nintendo Revolution controller, a simple-looking white remote-shaped device with buttons and a D-pad. The addition of the Nunchuk accessory and the promise of a Classic Controller cradle quelled fears that traditional games wouldn’t be suitable for the device, whilst the core controller itself excited many with its motion sensing and pointing abilities and what it could mean for games (First person shooters! Lightsabres!). Even third party developers looked to be fully on board, with a showreel of top industry names talking about the device and what they’d like to do with it in games.
Until just before E3 of 2006, Nintendo went quiet regarding Revolution, preferring to let interested spectators use their imagination about what could be brewing behind closed doors. It was on April the 27th that Nintendo broke their silence and announced what would be the final name of their next console. Wii. What seems like nothing now raised one heck of a calamitous response back then. Internet forums across the lands erupted in urine jokes and Photoshop imagery, while more rational gamers simply thought that Nintendo had lost their minds. Very few realised until much later that this was an ultimately brilliant marketing ploy; only one press release and suddenly the whole internet-equipped world knew about the next Nintendo machine.
Such potential...
US magazine Game Informer was the first publication in the world to show a Wii game in all its splendour, with Ubisoft’s Red Steel the chosen title. Although the images weren’t as high quality as the next generation machines from Sony and Microsoft were offering, many fans assumed that it would be from an early build, with Ubisoft not exactly in the front of technical expertise.
Just after that issue, Nintendo went full steam into the Electronic Entertainment Expo of 2006, and proceeded to blow the doors off of the Kodak Theater with an impressive showing. Starting it off was Shigeru Miyamoto himself conducting a virtual orchestra with a Wii Remote (which would later become Wii Music), and Reginald Fils-Aime once again kicking ass and taking names with trailer reels for a line-up that consisted of Metroid Prime 3, Excite Truck, Disaster: Day of Crisis, Project H.A.M.M.E.R. (sadly cancelled later), Super Mario Galaxy, Sonic Wild Fire (later renamed Sonic and the Secret Rings), Dragon Quest Swords, Wii Sports and many others. The on-stage controller demonstrations and top name line-up impressed considerably, though some were left wondering where Smash Bros. was; Nintendo answered that question the very next day with a roundtable conference and Super Smash Bros. Brawl’s first trailer, which featured the franchise’s first guest character Solid Snake. Ultimately there was slight disappointment regarding the GameCube visual levels of Wii, but that was balanced out by the seemingly infinite possibilities emanating from the controller, and the fact that the GameCube’s low level of support meant that very few developers actually maxed out on its capabilities anyway.
After that conference Nintendo were on course for an end of year Wii release; all that was left was to spread the word further to those outside of gaming’s reach. Many fans and publications did that well enough themselves; rumours of a super special console-defining feature behind Wii’s front flap for example, or the grey stand housing the unit’s power brick (as it turned out, the latter was false and the former was revealed to just be an SD card slot and the red controller sync button). After Sony’s embarrassing E3 2006 conference and sky high development costs for PlayStation 3, and Microsoft’s average showing with many gamers realising that 360 games at that point in time were mainly just prettier titles that played the same as ever, there was a lot of interest in Nintendo’s ‘new’ gen.
Towards the Wii’s release in the last two months of that year, the commercials and newsprint ads with just the Wii logo included came thick and fast; ones that got people taking about why someone was suddenly using another word for urine with a TV remote on the screen. Nintendo’s roadshow that took demo pods around the UK helped exposure too, with many stores like Gamestation and GAME separating out demo areas for people to try Wii Sports before its release. All this ensured a complete sellout upon the December 8th release, with a reported stock shortage still a year later. Wii has gone on to become a household name with mainstream publicity unheard of even with the original PlayStation, and though, due to the restrictions of the less powerful hardware, Wii-only owners have missed out on a high number of third party multiformat games, the little white machine that could still ended up with a large amount of quality software that flew under the radar.