I promise you I am not Reggie Fils-Aime blogging as a Nintendo fanman, nor am I channeling the great Reggie when I write posts like this one today. Put simply, over the weekend Reggie attacked the Nintendo attackers who say the Wii is a fad the proceeded to praise Halo and BioShock as tour de forces in the industry. He also said LittleBigPlanet is being released on the wrong system (too true, Regginator, too true!).
You would think that the DS, which was immediately labeled technologically weak and a fad by its competition, would have been enough to qualm these silly little diatribes about the Wii being a fad. Or even its game library which was nothing short of anemic in the period after its launch in 2005. That said, if anything we as a species have proven we are incapable of learning from the past and history, it would seem, is best digested in small chunks of time with an age no greater than one year. Anything beyond that and we risk inducing a headache. Reggie, fists bear and brow furled, is as always ready to address the criticism with equal parts education and ass kicking.
“There are a range of first-person shooter type games that are all very well done that could all do quite well on a Nintendo platform. Certainly, the Halo trilogy – anyone who would look at that and say, ‘No, I think we could live without it,’ probably doesn’t think real long about this industry. Even games like BioShock. I thought that was tremendously well done. The writing was tremendously clever. I would love to see more of that type of content in the industry overall that actually makes people think a little bit.”
This year was an exciting one because it was a launch year. Everything was new and untested. But 2008 is the real launch year, in my opinion. It’s when this system finds its feet, and the DS starts entering the beginning of its Golden Age.
Later in this interview Reggie talks about how 80-90 of the population must find video games accessible for Nintendo to believe the Wii and DS are a success. That to me means 2008 is going to be about a hundred times more interesting than this one — for Nintendo fans and general video game lovers alike.