Nintendo’s Harrison: WiiWare in 2007, Game Boy retired?

Game Boy retirement partySome interesting/sad news from Nintendo today. GameIndustry BIZ tells it like it is, or might be:

“It’s hard to say in the future if we will ever bring back the Game Boy trademark,” he told GameDaily BIZ. Harrison also informed us that Nintendo’s WiiWare service could actually still launch this year. When the announcement was first made, Nintendo made it seem like we wouldn’t see anything until early 2008, but Harrison isn’t ruling out 2007 entirely. “It may not take until 2008. I’ve seen a couple of ideas that have already been generated even before we went public [with WiiWare]. Whether those are going to be ready or not, I don’t really know,” he said. “It really depends on the developers. If they have their games ready and they’re of an appropriate quality, then there’s nothing to stop them from launching before the end of the year. It’s just the fact that we only recently gave out the development tools and the development specifications, so most people haven’t even started yet.”

Hear that? Get going developers! No sleep. No eat. No significant others. Just cold, lonely development. First to market gets the kingdom and the glory, and the lamentations of their women! And they can scream “w00t frist!” like so many of the Internet’s finest citizens do every day.

On the Game Boy front I’ve always secretly hoped that the next iteration of Nintendo’s hand held strategy would borrow a page from the retro book and revive the Game Boy trademark in a completely redesigned shell. All the bells and whistles but with those tell-tale letters a lot of us saw when we opened a small rectangular present at Christmas time in 1989. Sounds like it’s not slated to happen, but I can dream.

[Thanks, John!]