Xbox 360: An insider's story

What do you think of the name change?
Er... I thought it was not the greatest decision. Sometimes you only get 30 seconds to convince somebody. And if you take 30 seconds telling them why you called it Wii then you've wasted a lot of time and money. I thought at first it might have been a joke.

Could the name itself be Nintendo's downfall?
I think that Nintendo has such a different kind of product that it may not matter. It did manage to shift all the discussion from the name to the product at E3 and, once people saw what Wii was, it didn't seem like they cared so much about the name.

Above: Dean Takahashi reckons people will stop joking about Wii's name once they've played it

How badly did Sony do at E3?
I think pricing is going to be a huge problem for Sony. A lot of people have pointed out that you can buy a Wii and a 360 for the price of a premium PS3. And the games that Sony showed looked good, but Microsoft showed some games that looked better.

Does PS3's tilt-sensitive pad smack of desperation?
It's an option that Sony has had sitting around and it decided to pull the trigger on it to neutralise the threat of Wii. I think that's why there weren't many games [at E3] that exploited it yet. I did play the Warhawk game that used the tilt-sensing - flying with that controller was a lot more intuitive and freed up your thumbs for aiming and shooting. I think it has value, whether or not it's a copycat.

Ben Richardson is a former Staff Writer for Official PlayStation 2 magazine and a former Content Editor of GamesRadar+. In the years since Ben left GR, he has worked as a columnist, communications officer, charity coach, and podcast host – but we still look back to his news stories from time to time, they are a window into a different era of video games.