"Wii."
Get used to it. It's the name of Nintendo's newest console — the one we used to call "Revolution". But today, Nintendo cast aside the old code name and unveiled their brand-new chosen moniker, the name that will carry forth the system into its expected release this fall. Prepare yourself for Nintendo's next generation.
Poking around the Internet, you can find a wealth of reaction to the new name, and a very small fraction of it is positive, or even productive. Some people are confused, some people are outraged (some seem to be convinced that merely uttering the word will strip them of their masculinity), and a whole lot of people are just sitting around making jokes about urination and sexual organs. But these people — gaming addicts, reading gaming websites, frequenting gaming boards — these people are not the people Nintendo's seeking to reach with their changes.
Nintendo has made it crystal-clear over the past several months, between speeches by Nintendo president Satoru Iwata and NOA sales strategy point-man Reggie Fils-Aime that the Console Formerly Known as Revolution represents a dramatic shift in Nintendo's home console offerings. Bit-by-bit, we've seen it filter out, from Perrin Kaplan's post-E3-2005 admission that Revolution would only be "2-3x" as powerful as the current-generation Nintendo GameCube... to the controller revelation during last year's TGS... IGN's specifications leak, proving beyond the shadow of a doubt that Revolution was not competing with Sony's and Microsoft's new offerings... and now, today, the console's branding.
The branding serves to finally and completely set Wii apart from the other players in the home console space. The name, according to Nintendo, "sounds like 'we,' which emphasizes this console is for everyone." Gamers have already been targeted for some time with Nintendo's PR for the once-named Revolution. Nintendo has been hard at work bringing them over with the Revolution moniker, guiding them from early expectations by preaching the gospel of inclusiveness, very slowly letting on that the traditional road of more computing power was not the route they want to take their console. Nintendo wants to open up the possibility of reaching people that have been turned off by modern gaming, or have never even gamed before.
Now, we have the console's new name, the one that will shoulder the responsibility of communicating this change of direction to those people. It's a strange name, to be sure, but it does one job very well: it makes people ask what it's about. Nintendo certainly has its work cut out for it making sure that the story told is its own story: one of inclusiveness. Expect a very unique marketing push from Nintendo in this regard, though it may not be so visible to those of us who were spoken to by Revolution. While the Revolution name did a very good job at communicating to existing gamers what Nintendo's aim was, that job is done.
"Wii" is simple, short, and memorable. But most importantly, it doesn't carry the baggage of videogames as they're known in circles where traditional gamers don't live. As much as the name "Revolution" came to signify Nintendo's strategy to the traditional gamer, to the people who Nintendo wants to attract, it sounds no different than "PlayStation", "Xbox", or one of many other names that summons up images of that thing that you stuff $50 discs into that the kids like so much. It's unapproachable, and it makes no effort to be anything but. "Wii" is all about approachability, and it's all about inclusiveness.
Another very interesting thing to note is that for the first time, the console branding does not contain the word "Nintendo". I believe this is quite intentional, for a similar reason to those mentioned above: "Nintendo" also carries baggage that would alienate the people that Nintendo-the-company wants to attract. "Nintendo" means that gray box you had twenty years ago, which, while more accessible than the black boxes of today, still played largely into the hands of the kids. "Nintendo" even tangentially means the Game Boy brand, arguably one of the most powerful brands in America today, but that's all about something to give the kids to keep them quiet in the minivan.
Proof of this can be seen in the new DS Lite handheld. Nintendo's ubiquitous logo — otherwise seen as a badge on the Game Boy Advance SP and the current Nintendo DS — is almost entirely absent from the DS Lite; its branding is the two rounded-edged rectangles on the handheld's lid. You can only find the logo if you look at the underside of the system, where you'd normally find such wonderfully interesting things as the serial number and the voltage the system takes — and even there, it's tiny. The DS has found its market in Japan, and its new branding with the Lite reflects that. The DS stands alone — and so, also, Wii is meant to.
So what does all this mean to the people who have faithfully followed Revolution from its introduction? Those who have decided, as tales of radically new games and unique control styles have filtered out from Nintendo and from developers, to follow the console through its life? It means Nintendo's given you a job to do. When someone asks you about Wii, you'll find yourself explaining what it is. You'll be telling the tale of the Revolution: the tale of inclusiveness. The tale of Wii.