Revolution gathers pace
Price, date, third-party download details by end of year.
Pricing, launch date and other details of Nintendo's Revolution console will be unveiled before the end of 2006, company president Satoru Iwata has told the Reuters news agency.
"We plan to give details on when we will launch it, what the price will be, what the controller will look like and how games can be played on it by the end of the year," Iwata-san said last week.
The company is also talking to third-party game publishers about including their old Nintendo titles in its downloadable archives - one of the key components of the Revolution offering, which will see 20 years worth of content on NES, SNES and N64 made available via broadband.
The company has yet to decide on pricing options for the games, but Iwata-san indicated that it could charge per game, sell pre-paid cards in game stores or give titles away as part of promotions - something Nintendo has done in the past, bundling ported versions of old N64 games as second disk compilations with the likes of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker.
In a separate development, Nintendo veepee of corporate affairs Perrin Kaplan has said that Revolution will have "At least one new franchise. Brand new." in an interview with IGN.
Meanwhile, Animal Crossing DS producer Katsuya Eguchi has indicated that the DS version could link up with the Revolution, implying that a new Animal Crossing title could be bound for the next-generation platform.
Nintendo's plans for Revolution, including hardware and software details, were outlined in detail as part of the company's pre-E3 press conference last week, full details of which can be found here.