Two hundred forty-nine dollars, a controller you wave like a tennis racket, and a hardware sheet that reads like a lightly warmed-over GameCube. That is what Nintendo just put on shelves against a $599 PlayStation 3 and an Xbox 360 that has had a year to build its library. On paper, it looks like Nintendo brought a toy to a supercomputer fight, and I think that read is exactly the trap Nintendo wants everyone to walk into.
The Nintendo Wii runs an IBM Broadway chip that is basically the GameCube’s Gekko clocked higher, an ATI GPU descended from the same family, and it outputs standard-definition only in a year when every electronics store is wall-to-wall with HDTVs. Sony and Microsoft are selling teraflops and 1080p. Nintendo is selling a wrist flick. Iwata has been open about this being deliberate: the company went hunting for the people who quit gaming or never started, the ones who find a modern controller with two sticks and a dozen buttons intimidating. The industry has a name borrowed from a business book for this now, the blue ocean, going where the competition is not, instead of bleeding out in the same red water.
What makes me think it works is Wii Sports. It ships in the box in North America, which Nintendo has not done with a pack-in since the Super Nintendo, and ninety seconds with the bowling explains the entire console to someone who has never held a controller. You point it at the screen, you swing, and the character swings with you. My worry is everything downstream of that first ninety seconds. Third-party support is thin because publishers do not yet know how to build for motion, and standard definition will look worse and worse next to a 360 as flat panels take over the living room. The online setup, a mess of friend codes Nintendo seems embarrassed to talk about, does not help. I can’t even imagine for Europe when it will be available with the same hassle.
The bet underneath all of it is that Nintendo would rather own a market nobody else is serving than come third in the one everyone else is fighting over. GameCube came third, and that memory is driving this whole thing. The upside, if the families and the grandparents in those ad campaigns actually show up, is that Nintendo prints money on cheap hardware while Sony bleeds out on every PS3 it ships. Miss them, and this is just an underpowered curiosity with a gimmick controller, and the hardcore will have been right to sneer.
I am not going to pretend I know which way it breaks. The launch demand is real, and the units are hard to find, and that could be true blue-ocean pull, or it could be the usual Nintendo launch scarcity that fades by spring. What I keep coming back to is the nerve of shipping a weaker machine on purpose and daring the market to care about power. Ask me again in a year whether that was vision or just an excuse. And if you think it’s not an N64, just check the gaming ports. You can recycle your gamepads. It will be interesting to see which audience will buy the gaming system.