George Harrison is Nintendo’s senior vice president of marketing and communications. Here are some quotes of a recent interview with him:
-Harrison admits that a mere over-powered Gamecube would wind up doing just as bad as the GameCube. Because of this, Nintendo decided to do something totally different.
-Their main goal was to revive the Japanese market. The DS was to be the first shot at this (and it has clearly succeeded).
-Art direction can be just as expressive as photo-realistic graphics. He mentions that the Simpsons wouldn’t be nearly as funny if it was live action.
-Wii will be a multiple of the GameCube in terms of capabilities.
-Nintendo is still deciding what will be packed in the Wii. Right now a controller and a nunchuk add-on will be, but Nintendo is thinking about adding another controller as well. No mention of the shell.
-Nintendo is shooting for a worldwide Wii launch this year.
-“Clearly, for us, the Japanese market might be the most important – it’s the home market, it’s the chance to reset the clock to the main competition, which is Sony”.
-On price, as compared to the 360: “Yes, our goal is to come in at a slightly more mass market price.”
-Nintendo is considering some like XBL Marketplace.
-Harrison mentions that they learned a lot of lessons from the PS2, in terms of having a wide variety of software and the fact that the strongest tech doesn’t always win.
-“The other thing we recognized is that you really make your reputation in the first year. You’ve got to deliver software, not just at launch, but you’ve got to deliver software in the first six to nine months after launch. It has to be solid software. In GC, we didn’t have that, we had kind of a drought for six months after it launched. By that time your reputation starts to solidify and it’s hard to reverse that after awhile.”
-$50 games will not be the standard on the Wii, although he does say that there could be some games that cost $60.
-Compares the challenges Nintendo has in terms of marketing the Wii to those it had marketing the… Virtual Boy.
-You can’t simply show gameplay or people won’t see the difference. He mentions that game commercials used to show people on their couch playing the game, and that the industry moved away from that. He says Nintendo might get more into that with Wii marketing.
-Nintendo still hasn’t chosen a cost barrier for the Wii’s Virtual Console.
-Possibly 20 games at launch. He says they haven’t seen many of the games licensees have.
-“Maybe a third will be Nintendo games.”
-Red Steel is a Wii launch title, and will broaden appeal like GoldenEye 64 did.
-“We had no choice but to be successful with the DS.”
