Billy Berghammer, former director of Planet GameCube, recently interviewed Nintendo of America’s own George Harrison, and questioned him on many topics as Nintendo heads into the Wii’s second holiday season. Excerpt below:
GI: There was a lot of promise when WiiConnect24 was announced, with additional downloadable content that would magically appear on your Wii when you woke up every morning. Right now, it seems like it’s more of a blinker when you get Wii e-mails telling you when you can buy new stuff in the store. And third parties don’t have the ability to use it yet, either. Do you see that expanding more in 2008?
Harrison: Yeah, I think it will expand more in 2008. Certainly, the WiiWare will be coming sometime—we’re not quite sure when we’ll announce their window for the first titles that are available, but it shouldn’t be too far along in 2008. That’s very encouraging. We’re trying to deliver other things like marketing messages and interesting information and game trailers, as we did for Metroid. I certainly think the use of that will grow in the next year. I’m not really clear on what the status is of tool delivery for the third parties to allow them to be able to do that.
The rest of the interview talks about what to expect in 2008, whether or not we’ll have to wait until the next console for another true Super Mario game, third parties, and George Harrison’s retirement from Nintendo.
