by Playfuls Staff |
29th April 2006
After everybody seemed content by the name of "Revolution", Nintendo decided that this syntagm doesn't represent their ambitions for their new console and so, they put together an official baptism of the future competitor for Play Station 3 and Xbox 360. Yesterday [more] starting, the next generation console from Nintendo is officially named : Nintendo Wii.
I can't imagine what exactly the marketing division was thinking, but if they tried to create a storm and attract the spotlight, they were successful. The new name of the console, Wii (pronounced Wee) in the vision of the Nintendo staff, represents many things. In the first place, Wii is easy to memorize, and it is pronounced the same on any continent and it refers in a subtle way to its remote-control shaped controller with whom Nintendo hopes to create a revolution in the gaming industry.
The problem is, however, that the reactions generated by Nintendo Wii are far from being positive and the majority of the people who are at one with the fascinating gaming industry have declared themselves surprised by Nintendo's decision. It is a fact that Revolution sounded cooler than Wii and it seemed somewhat closer to Nintendo's intention to innovate.
Be it inspired or not, Nintendo's new name has the credit of being an innovation itself. Even from the first details released about the console, we realized that Nintendo wanted a head start in the competition. If Play Station 3 and Xbox 360 have decided to battle each other in performance (RAM quantities, number of GHz, high HDTV resolutions), Nintendo Revolution (excuse me, Nintendo Wii) has always concentrated itself upon giving a quality experience in gaming.
There are two tendencies that collide in this situation. First, there is Play Station 3 and Xbox 360 that bet on the fact that the idea of the game is not as important as the aesthetical part of the game. On the other side of the barricade there is Nintendo, that pushes on the side of the originality of an idea in a video game and it is less concerned about the details of the main character's hair on his head.
If you look closely to the game-lists for Xbox360 and Play Station 3, you'll see that the majority of the titles end if the numbers 2,3,4 (or even higher), meaning that the ideas that we have seen before in the past ten years of gaming are being recycled again. Nintendo Wii wants something new, even if they take their chances and risk of embarrassing themselves.
With this new console, Nintendo again creates a statement in being different even if this statement shall be countered by ironies of the ones with conventional thinking.
In a gaming industry where the very essence of a video game seems banished, Nintendo Wii reminds me of the times when a video game was solely for fun and when it's success was determined by the originality of the ideas instead of the graphics quality.
From another perspective, i ask all those who wish to criticize Nintendo's new name, to think about how inspired it seems for an MP3 player to be called an iPod or for a search engine to be called Google.
Before we launch ourselves in unending discussions concerning Nintendo's new console name, i think it is best for us to wait E3 Expo and see what does this formerly known as Revolution console has to offer, and not to forget that many times in history all the great innovators have been laughed at and criticized before.
