E3: George Harrison on Game Boy’s future, WiiWare

In a recent interview by GameDaily.biz, George Harrison talks about the Game Boy and WiiWare. GameDaily.biz hasn’t published the whole interview yet though so there’s still some more coming.

But one thing to note in the interview is mention of the Game Boy’s “retirement.” Harrison commented in an interview during E3 that “this year […] you really won’t see much push against Game Boy itself […] It’s hard to say in the future if we will ever bring back the Game Boy trademark.” With the DS so popular, attention was slowly diverted away from the Game Boy and gamers aren’t really clamoring for new games on the handheld so there isn’t much call for it to make a comeback.

The DS can be seen as a natural evolution of the Game Boy, and in many ways it is. Part of the reason that the DS wasn’t given the same name was that Nintendo President Satoru Iwata wanted to reach a new audience with the DS’s new approach to handheld gaming. Harrison puts it to us in this way:

It was a big risk for us to actually pass on it and call the new product the Nintendo DS, but it was part of Mr. Iwata’s philosophy that if we’re going to make a radical difference and try to reach a new audience, then we have to change the name… We had to make a break even though we had one of the greatest trademarks in the history of the industry.

And it really is one of the gaming industry’s prodigies. The Gameboy Color released in 1998 it had already sold 49 million units by the end 2004 and the Gameboy Advance released in 2001 sold 75 million by June of 2006. The very first Game Boy sold 70 million units worldwide.

But really, it’s not the Game Boy that’s retiring, just its name. You have the DS anyway, why settle for one screen when you can have two? Besides, there’s always emulators. Always look forward.

On a completely unrelated note but from the same interview, Harrison said that Nintendo’s WiiWare might still make it to the market before the end of 2007. He furthers that it all really depends on the game developers. Since they recently just released the technology, some developers haven’t even started.

Via GameDaily.biz

In a recent interview by GameDaily.biz, George Harrison talks about the Game Boy and WiiWare. GameDaily.biz hasn’t published the whole interview yet though so there’s still some more coming.

But one thing to note in the interview is mention of the Game Boy’s “retirement.” Harrison commented in an interview during E3 that “this year […] you really won’t see much push against Game Boy itself […] It’s hard to say in the future if we will ever bring back the Game Boy trademark.” With the DS so popular, attention was slowly diverted away from the Game Boy and gamers aren’t really clamoring for new games on the handheld so there isn’t much call for it to make a comeback.

The DS can be seen as a natural evolution of the Game Boy, and in many ways it is. Part of the reason that the DS wasn’t given the same name was that Nintendo President Satoru Iwata wanted to reach a new audience with the DS’s new approach to handheld gaming. Harrison puts it to us in this way:

It was a big risk for us to actually pass on it and call the new product the Nintendo DS, but it was part of Mr. Iwata’s philosophy that if we’re going to make a radical difference and try to reach a new audience, then we have to change the name… We had to make a break even though we had one of the greatest trademarks in the history of the industry.

And it really is one of the gaming industry’s prodigies. The Gameboy Color released in 1998 it had already sold 49 million units by the end 2004 and the Gameboy Advance released in 2001 sold 75 million by June of 2006. The very first Game Boy sold 70 million units worldwide.

But really, it’s not the Game Boy that’s retiring, just its name. You have the DS anyway, why settle for one screen when you can have two? Besides, there’s always emulators. Always look forward.

On a completely unrelated note but from the same interview, Harrison said that Nintendo’s WiiWare might still make it to the market before the end of 2007. He furthers that it all really depends on the game developers. Since they recently just released the technology, some developers haven’t even started.

Via GameDaily.biz