Rumors are surfacing for the 100th billionth time about Nintendo releasing a Wii successor. I'm not going to call it the "Wii 2" or "Wii HD" because I think those are stupid names, even as temporary standbys. Nintendo only made a direct "sequel" console once when they made the Super NES, and even then, it was not called the "NES 2". Lately they've preferred to come up with original names, but I think it would be cool to put "Nintendo" back into the actual name of the console. It's more iconic, makes more of a statement about who they are, and gives the system more of a impactful presence in the market. It wouldn't be GameCube, Xbox and PS2. It wouldn't be Wii, 360 and PS3. It would be the Nintendo, 360 and PS3. It puts the others in their place, because what other company can claim true leadership of the console market? Nintendo not only is the leader of sold units, they are what started the modern era of consoles. Others can only bow in reverence to their legacy. It would pay homage to the old Nintendo, the one fans used to know and love, and if there's ever been a time to win back their old fans, it's now.
Nintendo hasn't had the greatest track record of third party support since they pissed many of them off with the design of the N64. Since that system, Nintendo's made a name for themselves of putting innovation ahead of all else, choosing to differentiate their products from the rest of the pack at the cost of popularity with the more hardcore crowd. They're not a company to sit complacently with the status norm, and while they invented how consoles are played nowadays, they've all but denounced it, instead swinging into a completely different direction, refusing to play ball in the same court as their competitors. But by effectively "skipping" a generation with the introduction of a revamped GameCube, they have a chance to one-up the competition while they have their pants down, and in turn possibly win back some of the support they've lost.
Right now many gaming enthusiasts are getting antsy about a new console generation. They've always gotten it, like clockwork every five or six years. But this generation is different, and while most consumers and developers are perfectly content with how things are now, others have to contend with a massively extended console cycle. Such a thing rides against the grain of experience, and it's enough to drive many people to rock anxiously in their seats, restlessly waggling their feet while chewing their fingernails to the point of bleeding. The best they'll get this year is new handhelds, which is enough for some, and should make for an exciting and successful new generation of portables. But consoles will continue to languish in excitement for some time to come, and while some ambitious attempts to reinvigorate the current generation have been met with some success, the sense of novelty has long worn off, and now they share familiarity with a pair of visiting hobos overstaying their welcome.
Nintendo can't help but see an opportunity here. What better time to launch a new system than now, when others still have three or four years of growing repetition to look forward to? With the latest rumors, IGN goes so far as to claim performance will leapfrog the PS3 and 360. That's something that isn't too hard to do at this point, and cheaply at that. If they can at least offer marginally better performance, specifically addressing the memory bottleneck of current consoles, they can produce a solid enough improvement to at least entice some of the more cutting-edge developers and get the hardcore crowd energized. Such a thing would do wonders for Nintendo's flagging third-party support, and at the very least get them included amongst the cross-platform mega releases.
You can almost picture the hardware specs. Continuing their relations with former ATI, an AMD Fusion chip would be a cheap and powerful successor over the Wii and even the big boy machines. The latest information pegs a Fusion's integrated graphics at 400 SPs, and even if you knock that down by a couple SIMDs, and cut the quad-core CPU down to two, you still have a low-profile, low-cost solution that trumps the competition and leaves you sitting at least somewhat comfortably when the next generation rolls around, at least more comfortably than the Wii is next to the PS3 and 360. But Nintendo rarely goes the predictable route with hardware, and the question is, do they even want to?
Thing is, Nintendo is making a killing doing things the way they are now. They've taken Gumpei Yokoi's philosophy of "the lateral thinking of withered technology" from the handheld realm into their console business, and it's paid off big for them. Using old technology on consoles allows them to sell their console cheaply, and make money off of them from the first day of launch. It also allows developers to make games cheaply, and by coming up with innovative new ways to play on that old technology, they've attracted non-gamers as well, expanding their sales range outside of previous boundaries, beyond what is achievable on traditional consoles. And the future of high-tech consoles isn't too terribly bright either. Sales of this generation of HD consoles has been drastically slower than the previous generation, and promises to be even slower the next generation as the visual difference between them diminishes.
Now that 2005-level graphics has been the mainstay for quite some time, following the withered technology thesis, that may be all Nintendo tries to shoot for. While it may disappoint a vocal segment of gamers, what say do those folks have next to the enormous pool of mainstream consumers out there that pour in the real revenue? Sad as it is for the more serious gamers out there, Nintendo has no incentive to answer to them anymore. In many ways, a lot of people feel abandoned by them, and those are the sort of people that now align themselves with the 360 and PS3. While at one time, they considered Nintendo a mighty and omnipotent force in gaming, with every new release heralding a new era of greatness, they now consider themselves driven away -- an afterthought and irrelevant in the business strategy of their once beloved company.
The latest gaming platforms from Nintendo have seen a huge disproportion of great games to utterly shitty ones. Developers will release whatever they can pick loose from the scraggly hairs of their unwashed asscracks, and Nintendo's once formidable Seal of Quality no longer has any bearing on what it constitutes as subjective thresholds of acceptability. While most companies might stop and think "Can we really sustain ourselves for very long on an overt plethora of mediocrity and crap?" Nintendo has long since left behind considerations of consumer perception and self-image. This is a drastic philosophical switch from their humble beginnings when they limited developers to five games a year, and imposed strict guidelines for how games should be, just to ensure that what caused the videogame market crash of the 80s couldn't happen to them. It wasn't companies pushing the technological envelope that nearly killed the industry, it was the sheer avalanche of horrible games. Unfortunately if that's truly the belief of the executives behind Nintendo, then it will take more than a platform change to turn them around.
Still, a new Nintendo console is inevitable, and when all is said and done, Nintendo still makes some incredibly acclaimed games. Their franchises are some of the very few that not only withstood the 2D to 3D transition, they reveled in it, and are some of the longest running successes in the industry. When you look at all the once-loved franchises that toppled out from greatness only to be forgotten or even scoffed at, it really puts it into perspective for what an achievement Nintendo has made here, and the kind of true prowess they still possess all these years later. For many, it may be enough to finally see those franchises in glorious HD with all the bells and whistles of modernity, and certainly it would be enough to propel them into another success. Many are shuddering nervously at the thought of what strange concoction of outside-the-box thinking they've incorporated this time. But as any system advances, so must its games, and that might mean more contemporary standards of gameplay than the family-friendly deluge that we've become accustomed to. Whenever it happens, here's hoping, at least.
