A Mature Mario

Absolutely. That is the goal--[to make a Mario game that appeals to teens]. Now, have I seen it yet? No. Do I know that they're working on it? Yes. But that has certainly been a key driver and a key messaging within NCL is: what is that next generation? And I think it's very important to note that what our game fans are also beginning to see is our next generation of great developers."

Reggie talks third party support and its relation to the Revolution's mystery controller. EGM asked him how games like Splinter Cell will work with the changes

"The thing that I always find surprising, and certainly in the last year I've had wonderful opportunities to spend quality time with a number of our key third-party publishers, is when you sit down and share the innovation with them, just how excited they get. I saw it firsthand with DS; we're seeing it now with Revolution. The fact that you and your fans haven't seen the controller doesn't mean that no one else has.

I mean, again, and Mr. Iwata did this during his presentation on Tuesday—if you just think about it, we're going to have the ability through wireless internet to download all of your great games from NES, SNES, N64. Think about it: Each of those controllers were different. How are you gonna play? That captured some the imagination of what our controller needs to be able to do, and certainly as you get into the meat of that type of innovation with the developers, their eyes truly light up because they start to imagine what's possible with that type of configuration, which is vastly different than a sheer horsepower type of game."

On Revolution pricing, Reggie confirmed that it will be cheaper than the Xbox 360 and PS3.

"We have to assume that from a pricing standpoint, we will be substantially lower than the competition, because we don't have all of that added fluff that a gamer, frankly, doesn't—it's not core to gaming. Now, we'll see what happens when their pricing is announced and when ours is, but just as a rational businessperson, it leads you down that path."

On Sony's PS3 multi-task machine

"What I can tell you is the other time that Sony tried [making an all-purpose console], it failed miserably. And it's called the PSX. So I think that the consumer will vote with their dollar when everything comes out and everything is known. We do believe a center-of-the-plate gaming strategy is going to make sense in this marketplace. Especially when it's supported with fantastic software."

Nintendo hopes to bring more gamers into the online gaming community.

"As we get into the Internet space, the first way we're going to get there, obviously, is with Nintendo DS, which is going to be having wireless-enabled games for this holiday season. So principles that we're applying for DS are the same principles we're going to apply for Revolution, which is, we want to make it easy and included for the consumer. We want our games to be, if you will, optimized for online play. We want it to be free, so that there are no cost barriers, but we want it to be an overall fun experience so that there's also no what I call experience barriers.

By doing all that, we believe we can drive up our participation rate of online play to be well in excess of about the 15 percent you see today. And the 15 percent comes from a number of industry sources, but if you think about it, 15 out of every 100 consumers who buy an online game actually go and play it online. That's pretty small. Versus what we want to see, for example, with Mario Kart, is we want to see 80, 90, 95, near 100 percent of folks who actually enjoy the experience so much, who have access to the experience, to go do it online.

That, philosophically, is quite different than what our competitors do. There's going to be no subscription fee; we're not looking at this as a profit-driven program. We're looking at it as a way to bring more enjoyment and satisfaction to the game. And we think with what we're doing on Kart, what we're going to be doing on Animal Crossing, what we're going to be doing on future Revolution wireless Internet games, we think that's a fundamentally different model than what's being done today."