Iwata Talks Revolution, Online Games, Audience

In an interview with Japanese newspaper Nikkei Business Daily, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has made further hints as to the nature of the Revolution console – the codename for the successor to the GameCube. Expanding on his GDC keynote speech, Iwata commented on what he saw as an unexpectedly positive response from developers. He suggested that keeping down development costs was of critical importance to Nintendo, and as such the Revolution would use the same application program interfaces (APIs) as the GameCube. Iwata also spoke again of his desire to attract a new audience to video games, by allowing "users to experience games in ways that nobody has yet imagined." The primary means of this seems to be the nature of the Revolution's controller, which is a closely guarded secret. Iwata comments: "For the next-generation console, we plan to introduce a friendly user interface so that, for example, a mother who's watching her child playing a game might say, 'Oh, I'd like to try that too.' However, user interfaces are devices that can be easily imitated by other companies, so I can't reveal any details right now." Finally, Iwata re-affirmed that the Revolution would have a wireless LAN capability, and in saying that, he hoped the Revolution would "put an end to the need for consumers to have highly technical skills to play games online", he appeared to confirm that this capability would be used in online titles – something he appeared to go out of his way not to do at GDC. "The next-generation console will follow along that same line as the DS", Iwata concluded. "The ideal is for users to be able to connect to the Internet without having to think about it."