How the Wii Was Born

saintory writes "Ars Technica has an article up looking at how the Wii was born. It's a nice overview of how Nintendo's culture came up with the 'new-gen' system." More from the article: "'Diverging from the road map takes a fair amount of courage,' [Engineer Shiota] said, 'especially when we didn't have a clear image of what we were going to do with this hardware.' However, once he saw the power level reduction (from one-third to as little as one-fourth that of current hardware) he was very excited. Instead of competing on 'how many more times the CPU is going to be faster, how much more memory is going to be on the machine, and how many more polygons can be rendered' he saw Nintendo as being able to do something different and unique."

Comments

Re:Power Consumption

[chrismcdirty]

I'm by far no expert, but I believe the reason people say it's better to unplug everything is the miniscule power drain from being plugged in. It won't cost you more than a few dollars a year. But when the entire world is leaving devices plugged in, it ends up being a huge amount of power devoted to doing nothing.

Re:Power to the Wii

[XxtraLarGe]

IMHO, gameplay always trumps graphics. Case in point, Civ 2 vs. Civ 3. (possibly Civ 4). To be honest, none of the Next-Gen consoles offer anything compelling enough to make me want to buy them, at least not at the current price point. I don't have a HD television, and I don't have tons of money to spend on games. If somebody asked me what they should buy for a game console today, I'd tell them PS2. You're getting a console that plays DVD's and has a huge collection of great games for $20, and free online play. If I had to pick a Next-Gen console though, it would be the Wii based on price point and game selection.