Ok…calm down and breathe. In the immortal words of the Holy Guide, DON’T PANIC. I don’t think the boys at EAD have whipped up the successor to one of the most feeble hardware releases of all time. Seriously. Instead, I just wanted to ease into the whole ‘Revolution Revelation’ this weekend with a couple of related posts that focus on what we can pretty much chisel in stone regarding Nintendo’s behaviours, their tech experiments, and how a cool idea in the lab can often go bad under consumer scrutinty.
Case in point? The infamous Virtual Boy. At the time, it was a cutting-edge, 32-bit (equivalent), self-contained, extremely immersive, ergonomically controlled, 3D gaming experience with stereo sound. Sounds WICKED on paper, right? But for anyone who spent more than an hour with their face buried in that sweaty black vulva of a display – with the key component being the reduction of one’s sense of sight to a tiny sliver of wavelength on the crimson end of the visible light spectrum – well, let’s just say that it wasn’t a surprise when the project’s designer Gumpei Yokoi was swept from the Big N’s Kyoto HQ in relative disgrace (God rest his Gameboy-makin’ soul).
And it doesn’t take the freakin’ Batman to divine that Nintendo’s been playing around with some interesting technologies for years now. Some of these are rumoured to be essential components of the Revolution experience. And, if and when all of them come together, it could indeed be a complete paradigm shift in the way we play games – from both a display AND an interface perspective. But are we going to be READY for it? Is it what we’ll actually WANT to play come Xmas 2006? Plain and simple question, gang…is it a good idea on paper that’s destined to fail in the living room?
