Wii, the Underdog

As the Nintendo Wii is the underdog, could they prove that they could win?

It is also this philosophy (a creative and ideological nature, rather than a strictly technological one) – or one with many parallels – that inspired Nintendo to release the DS, and is inspiring the Wii. When the DS was first announced, Nintendo assured the press that it was simply a fun little experiment, and that it was in no way meant to replace the Game Boy line. As it chanced in that case, Nintendo happened to be right on with some of its theories – resulting in one of the industry’s biggest left-field success stories in generations, and setting off a period of reappraisal over what everyone expects from a mainstream videogame system.

The Wii promises to go a step further, both striking out with Nintendo’s newly substantiated theories in attempt to do the iPod thing to Sony’s proverbial Walkman and attempting to service the existing status quo in the most backhanded manner possible – by tracing its history all the way back to its inception, encapsulating it all in one place, and juxtaposing that with its proposal for a new status quo – the whole idea being, of course, that this new umbrella is only temporary – as every umbrella by nature must be.And curiously, Nintendo is not situating the system to “win� – to dominate the market by force – rather, its idea is to ingratiate the Wii to everybody as a second choice – as an alternate perspective, that just maybe they’ll find interesting enough to start thinking a little bit more about what they want from the medium. Though this might be one of the most mainstream of examples, it just serves to illustrate Nintendo’s grasp upon the true power of the underdog.

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