Nintendo goes into Los Angeles this week with a console named Wii, a launch window nobody has pinned down, and a controller that has to carry the entire company on its own. I do not think that last part is an exaggeration.
Look at what they are bringing versus what Sony and Microsoft are bringing. The 360 has been on sale since November and has a year of software behind it. Sony is arriving with a machine whose specifications are genuinely frightening and a price that is going to make people gasp. Nintendo is arriving with hardware that is, by any honest reading, a tidied up GameCube, and a remote you point at the screen.
They cannot win the specification argument and to their credit they have stopped trying. The remote is not a feature on this console, it is the entire product thesis: that the reason most people do not play games is not price or graphics but that a controller with two sticks and a dozen buttons is genuinely intimidating to anyone who did not grow up holding one. Hand those people something shaped like a television remote and the barrier drops.
I believe the diagnosis. I am much less sure about the cure, and this week is when we find out, because a motion controller is the single hardest thing in gaming to demonstrate honestly. On a show floor, with a Nintendo employee standing next to you explaining what to do, in a five minute slot built around a tech demo, almost anything feels magical. The question nobody can answer in Los Angeles is what it feels like in month four, in a living room, playing something with actual depth, when the novelty has gone and your arm is tired.
The nunchuk attachment is the part I am watching most closely, because it is the admission that pointing alone does not cover everything. The moment you need an analogue stick in your other hand for anything complicated, you have reintroduced the complexity you claimed to be removing, and you have done it with a wire between two halves.
What would convince me is not a tech demo. It is one game, built by somebody outside Nintendo, that could not exist with a normal controller and that you would still want to play in a year. If that is on the floor this week, the strategy works. If everything playable is a collection of minigames demonstrating that the remote can detect a swing, then Nintendo has built a very clever peripheral and attached a console to it, and the third parties will smile politely and keep shipping to the other two.