E3 2005: Nintendo revert to teasing

Revolution could be just that...

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The longest running player in the console business has come under criticism for the lack of concrete details that have emerged at this year's E3 for their next-generation Revolution console. While their rivals have been hyping and pimping their next consoles Nintendo's presence at the show has been relatively muted. And Nintendo is in now hurry to clarify things. Nintendo head honcho Satoru Iwata has finally broken his company's silence on some of the most burning questions surrounding all three next-gen machines. But not in a way that is going to bring solace to anyone in search of absolutes.

Mr Iwata did finally speak the words at the front of many minds, such as "price", "controller" and "launch date", but rather then giving any sort of useful response, he preferred to keep things mysterious, only stating that the company will reveal all these details next year. Thanks of putting us out of our misery Mr Iwata. But while there's nothing so tangible as a price point or some technical specifications Nintendo executives and PR people are positively gushing when it comes to discussing the new directions that Nintendo is keen to take gaming with the Revolution.

After the retro gaming capabilities of the Revolution, the next area that has been getting a lot of interest is the development environment vision that Nintendo is creating for their latest console. While my first thought on this emphasis on the ease of creating games for the Revolution figured Nintendo were trying to deflect attention from the sense that their console will be seriously underpowered in comparison to the new offerings from MS and Sony, as E3 has progressed it's becoming more apparent that this is a serious goal for Nintendo. The Revolution looks like it will not be based on unique control systems as many presumed pre-expo, but on a new attitude towards the inception, creation and design of video-gaming, keeping this in mind, it's interesting to peruse a recent Nintendo press release and ponder on the potential significance of this paragraph.

Freedom of design: A dynamic development architecture equally accommodates both big-budget, high-profile game "masterpieces" as well as indie games conceived by individual developers equipped with only a big idea.

While I initially joked that the easy-programming environment that Nintendo were pimping would lead to the Revolution becoming a kind of wastebasket of substandard programmers, after a good night's sleep and some thinking time a less cynical view begins to form. Ever since the rough and tumble birth of the first few generations of console gaming, manufacturers have retained an Iron grip over the games they permit to appear on their machines. Byzantine legal agreements have, almost without exception, given console makers the last say over which games were good enough to gain their stamp of approval and thereby gain distribution permissions for the various regions involved. If the above passage is to be taken at face value then it seems like Nintendo is going to relinquish their grip over the publishing aspect of the business.

So will the Revolution really become a hotbed of independent development? Or will things to return to the bad old days when any old shite could be slapped on a cartridge and sold to unsuspecting punters? Nintendo are likely to hold onto some executive rights so as to retain some form of quality control. Even so, if Nintendo do indeed open up console development to much smaller teams then has been the norm they could help to reinvigorate the morass of repetition that mainstream development is succumbing to.It's also not too hard to concoct a situation where the Revolution is such a streamlined development platform that Nintendo could sell a range of gaming construction sets as entertainment products, a move that could really create a Revolution in gaming. Then again, Microsoft have cannily taken a little wind out Nintendo's sails even before they've begun to fill out. Their Xbox Live Arcade service has just gone Live and many of the games on this download-only service are already being created by smaller independent developers. With both Microsoft and Nintendo encouraging the smaller more energetic development teams it looks like a couple of major players are trying to arrest a creative stagnation in the industry, a move that will hopefully shore things up and prevent a second video games crash.

By Sam Gibson