Nintendo confirmed last week that the console everybody has been calling the Revolution for two years will actually be sold as the Wii, and I have watched the internet spend seven days being extremely funny about it.
The jokes are obvious and I am not going to make them. What interests me is that Nintendo knew exactly what would happen and did it anyway, which tells you the name is doing a specific job. Revolution was a word aimed at people who already read about consoles. Wii is aimed at somebody who does not, is short enough to say across a shop floor, and is deliberately not a word that sounds like it belongs to the existing gaming vocabulary. Nintendo has been signalling for a year that it does not want to fight for the customer Sony and Microsoft are fighting over. The name is the loudest version of that signal yet.
Which sets up next month in Los Angeles rather nicely, because all three of these companies now have to explain themselves in the same building within about seventy hours.
Sony has the hardest job and the least room. We know roughly what is inside the machine and it is formidable on paper. What nobody has said out loud is the price, and the components involved do not suggest a comfortable number. There is a Blu-ray drive in there, a processor that is genuinely exotic, and a launch window that has already slipped from spring. Sony arrives at this show needing to announce a date, a price and a reason, and I suspect two of those three will disappoint somebody.
Nintendo needs to make the controller make sense to people who have only seen photographs of it. That is a demonstration problem rather than an argument, and it has to happen in a room where thirty other companies are competing for attention with volume. If the machine is as different as Nintendo keeps implying, showing it once properly is worth more than any specification sheet. If the pointing works and feels immediate, everybody in that hall will know within a day. If it feels like a gimmick, everybody will know that within a day too, and Nintendo will spend the next eighteen months arguing with an impression formed in ten seconds.
Microsoft is in the comfortable position for once. Its console has been on sale since November, its problem is a thin library, and the fix for a thin library is to stand on a stage and show games. Anything with Halo attached will do most of the work regardless of what state it is in.
What I would actually like to see, and confidently will not, is any of the three saying something honest about online. Microsoft has a functioning service and treats it as a bullet point. Sony has not explained what its equivalent is or whether it costs anything. Nintendo appears not to have thought about it much at all. Every one of these companies is about to sell a machine that will be in living rooms for six or seven years, and the part that determines whether people keep using it is the part getting the least stage time.
My expectation for the show is a very expensive PlayStation, a Nintendo demonstration that either lands completely or not at all, and Microsoft quietly having the best week of the three by simply having product. Ask me in a month whether any of that survived contact with the actual thing.