Shigsy talks Wii

Thursday 25 May 2006
When Nintendo announced that its next-gen console would be called Wii - instead of its long-standing codename, Revolution - it wasn't just the unsuspecting gaming world that found it hard to swallow. Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Mario and Zelda, thought it was all a bit odd as well.

Like most people he was quite happy with the original name. Talking to cnn.com he revealed that he felt that "the name Revolution was very appropriate to what we were doing".

However, Miyamoto explained that many at Nintendo thought the name Revolution would be "threatening" to non-gamers - "it wasn't acceptable, so we thought this was friendlier and more inviting."

Now Shigsy is perfectly happy with the Wii name and believes the warm reception it received at this year's E3 shows that gamers are now getting used to it.

Miyamoto also mentioned the Wii tennis demo shown at Nintendo's recent pre-E3 conference, which used caricatures of himself, Satoru Iwata and Reggie File-Aime, and suggested that the final game might feature a way for gamers to create a similar stylized likeness of themselves.

"We have some different ideas about how to take advantage of that functionality and we will be sharing that type of functionality with third parties."