Answer: When Nintendo announces something and every news outlet in the world goes nuts for two days. That's what happened after Nintendo announced that it was going into the 3D market with the handheld 3DS (Nintendo's tentative title or its announced 3D handheld). I was just driving home yesterday listening to 680 News here in Toronto to get traffic updates when the Mario music came on and the anchor folk breathlessly reported on the 3DS. I come home and Rick Sanchez and Wolf Blitzer are yelling about it on CNN. I go online and every news outlet from legitimate sites to small blogs are trumpeting "Nintendo jumps on 3D bandwagon!!". What's captured everyone's imagination too is that Nintendo claims that the 3D in this handheld console will not require glasses and that it's supposed to come out by March 2011 (although rumors place it at the end of this year, just in time for Christmas). It's supposedly getting an unveiling in June of this year.
It makes me laugh. I'm not the biggest fan of the Wii, although the DS is pretty effin' sweet. It's just that Sony and Microsoft, who only arrived on the console scene in the mid-90's (about a decade after Nintendo took the world by storm), always go on about how Nintendo is old-hat, old fashioned, they're too much about kiddie entertainment, and on and on and on they go. Yet, Nintendo merely sneezes and everyone is dying of interest. To me, Nintendo has always been about innovation. Sure, you might not like the Wii, but it brought Nintendo to the top of the industry once more for over two years, crushing much more advanced systems in sales, and had at least Sony coming out with its own rip-off of Wii's interface with avatars that had the same principles as Miis. And the PSP has always languished in the basement while Nintendo's DS destroys all who come in its path (as did Gameboy Advance before it, and the Gameboy Color before it, and the granddaddy beige-and-spinach-green Gameboy before it). Now Sony is all mad that Nintendo is getting all this fever-pitch free press and is lashing out at Nintendo .
In fairness, Nintendo did have a doozy of a dud in the VirtuaBoy, the so-called Virtual Reality version of Gameboy. It had maybe 4 or 6 games, was huge and clunky, not very portable, and gave you a headache just playing it. What it did offer was 3D graphics -- pretty good 3D graphics, though they were black-and-red. It died a quick death and was quickly swept under the rug to make way for Gameboy Colour and Gameboy Advance. But it's often held as a shining example that even the juggernaut Nintendo can stumble.
But my point is that, in the video-game industry, after all these years, Nintendo still sets the pace. They innovate, competitors complain, and then conform to Nintendo's innovation creating rip-offs of their own. Sega made Sonic and Playstation created Crash Bandacoot (remember that ass-clown?) only because Nintendo was crushing them with highly successful Mario games. We now have Dance Dance Revolution and its progeny because of the Nintendo Power Pad all the way back in 1985. Motion capture technology for home consoles is being considered by Microsoft and Sony and pretty soon this 3DS will force everyone to rethink handheld consoles.
I guess it looked more impressive in 3D.
Now, maybe this 3DS will suck. But the possibilities are staggering if it doesn't. Many believe the 3D effect will be achieved with a special lens leveraged by scores of tiny mirrors. The technology is out. By most reports, it doesn't impress, but maybe compressed on a small screen it can work. And you can only see the image if you look at it from a certain angle. My prediction is that 3DS will sell briskly the first month or two (and will do monster sales if it really is coming out at the end of this year as rumored), it will be leveraged by Nintendo backed titles (one or two) that will be stellar, there will be complaints of headaches, etc. From there, success really depends on whether the 3rd party licensees will embrace this new technology and make games for it (Capcom, Rockstar, Square, etc.). With the break-neck speed with which Nintendo seems to be moving on this, I don't see them showing licensees how the tech works in time for anyone to make anything noteworthy for launch-time. Anyway, who knows? It's got everyone talking at least, and dreaming of the possibilities.
-Deceptisean
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