As many of you have heard, the big Nintendo news this week is that there will most likely not be any news from Nintendo in the following week, at least not from the 2007 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. What you may not have heard (if you don’t like digging through sources) is exactly why.
The reason is somewhat convoluted, but here’s a simplification of the epic mini-series that forms the backbone of this story: A large government-controlled corporation in Japan was formed in 2002 for the purpose of buying stocks from various banks to prevent those stocks from being liquidated by any one individual or entity. This corporatation was cleverly titled the “Banks Shareholdings Purchase Corporation,” and they began to sell their stock of shares in January of this year, with a gradual release of all their stocks by the year 2017. 8 days ago, Nintendo requested a more immediate release of all the BSPC’s 1.987M shares of Nintendo’s common stock (which amounts to 1.4% of all Nintendo stock), in a move that made some people very upset for reasons that I’m sure I’d understand, had I gone to college.
The stocks haven’t been traded yet, however, and Nintendo has therefore issued a gag order to its various mouthpieces at the GDC, including – but not limited to – Reggie Fils-Aime, Perrin Kaplan, and Shigeru Miyamoto, the latter of whom is due to deliver his keynote address on Thursday morning of the conference, which experts agree will now be “150% more awkward.” The gag order was likely implemented to prevent the rise in stock value that is normally associated with the announcement of new products and services at events such as these; Any rise in Nintendo’s stock after the GDC can now be entirely attributed to the quality of the scripted jokes and anecdotes used in their panels. Truly, this is Reggie’s time to shine.
What do you think Nintendo can re-hash to generate a week’s worth of content? Is it too unrealistic to hope for an interpretive dance involving the Wii remote?