Apr 27
The Revolution will not be televised - no, really.
The tech industry in general only does two things, ever, with codenames:
- Create a product with a really cool codename and then completely, utterly and in every way decimate the product by changing the name in the 11th hour to something really super gay.
- Create a product with a codename so utterly hilarious that nobody will take it seriously even the name is eventually changed to Terminator or Annhilator or Huge Penis*.
* this codename is immediately invalidated for use in Microsoft projects, because Microsoft Huge Penis is arguably more ludicrous than Microsoft Bob.
Let’s examine a bit of market history, shall we?
The first codename I remember really catching on was Warp. That was IBM’s name for their “Windows killer” OS/2 3.0 release. Result: Everybody tried to take it seriously. “Warp” is a pretty cool codename. Unfortunately, even though it was technically superior, it couldn’t deliver the one thing it needed to: Windows application compatibility. Too bad, because OS/2 has been a very solid OS. (Interestingly, IBM kept the codename as part of the product name with OS/2 Warp 4, even though that particular project was officially codenamed “Merlin.”)
Microsoft’s codenames are a long history of disaster after disaster. Chicago, a resonably charismatic name, ended up being Windows 95. This would start the godawful trend of scrapping version numbers in favor of years, a trend which unfortunately caught on and ran for a very long time in Windows-land, and is just now starting to end. Slowly. Far too slowly for my taste. In addition, we have Memphis (Win98), Whistler (WinXP) and the everpresent duo of Longhorn and Blackcomb. Longhorn as we know it became Windows Vista, an OS that in its many years of development has already created and shed many cool nicknames as Microsoft scraps good features from their OS (in an apparent effort to turn what could have potentially beeen a very unique and interesting OS with a unique scripting shell, revolutionary filesystem and real user security into Windows XP Service Pack 3.) And let’s not forget Utopia - possibly Microsoft’s biggest codename blunder ever. I bet you remember it. When it finally hit market it was called Microsoft Bob.
CPU manufacturers aren’t exempt either. However, one can clearly make a distinction between Intel’s flaccid Tualatin, Dothan, Northwood, Nocona and Prestonia versus AMD’s Thunderbird, Thoroughbred, and the whole Claw/SledgeHammer CPU generation. Admittedly, AMD’s had some lame-sounding names too (Morgan, Barton) but Intel seems to have never had a single good sounding name since the Triton chipset was released. Intel’s new product release names ere even lamer: viiv, core, Centrino? Who thinks up this shit? Admittedly, AMD’s are hardly cooler: Athlon 64 (seriously, guys, branding is the height of unoriginality), Opteron, Duron, Sempron. I’m never going to forgive them for Sempron. And where the fuck is my CPU named after the coolest of all Hammers, the Ball Peen Hammer?
Arguably, the only PC manufacturer that has embraced (not extended) their codenames is Apple. I know, “look at the Apple fanboy gush!” But seriously, how cool is naming an entire OS line after predator cats? I’m using Tiger right now, and before that I used Panther and Jaguar. I’ll be using Leopard when it comes out, too. Shit, man, they put the codenames on the fucking box. Fuck yeah. Even the API’s are referred to by their codenames (Carbon, Cocoa, et. al.) The OSs that never happened were even cool - Star Trek and Copland and Gershwin. (We’ll give them a little slack for Pink, but by God, not a lot. Pink, for Christ’s fucking sake. We can’t even blame this one on IBM, either, because their codenames are pretty damned cool.)
So why, you ask, are you hashing all this shit out? Easy. Because Nintendo, like Microsoft, has a great history of tripping over their own feet with codenames. Project Reality became Nintendo 64. Atlantis became Game Boy Advance. Nitro became the DS. Admittedly, the Gamecube’s nickname, Dolphin, was pretty fucking lame. Then they announce a project named Revolution. Say what you want, but Revolution is the closest anybody has come since Sledgehammer to the “reach into that bag and grab me my wallet, it’s the one with Bad Mother Fucker on it” of codenames. But it’s not the official product name. They announced it today.
Ladies and Gentlemen: the Revolution will hereinafter be known as the Nintendo wii.
If you didn’t snicker a little bit when you first read about that, then you have no sense of humor.
April 28th, 2006 at 6:45 am
It’s funny because I can appreciate what Nintendo is trying to do with its new name for the console as well as the potential marketing campaign that’ll come with it, but it does feel like they came up a little short in the end. I do think that not calling it “Revolution” is a good thing because Nintendo needs to move their image in a different direction than the traditional Playstation, Xbox, and PC gaming image. That image is the more “hardcore” gamer style market because they could not compete in that market. With their Wii marketing campaign, it looks to me as though they are trying to create a new market for non-gamers and gamers who are getting increasingly sick of hardcore gaming; a more casual gaming market that isn’t necessarily kiddie to the extreme, but isn’t GTA and Halo, either. The name Revolution does not fit with that kind of market or marketing campaign. The Wii thing kind of does at least with their explanation of it being associated with the English word we, since we is inclusive and it doesn’t congure up images of “extreme” and “hardcore”.
The problem with the Wii thing is that it sounds silly to English speakers because we is a pronoun, and that the pronunciation has some negative, or silly meanings. Nintendo Wii is a clumsy name for English speakers, and for Americans in particular, “Wii” can mean small, piss, penis, or a myriad of other jokey things. It feels like Nintendo didn’t bother to gauge what the response to such a name would be in the American market. I bet that Wii probably doesn’t sound a ridiculous in Japan as it does here. It kind of feels like the Chevy Nova in Mexico urban legend, but this time it’s actually coming true.
I’m still looking forward to this console as the controller looks like it might lead to some innovative, fun games. I’ve had more fun with my Nintendo DS than I’ve had with any game machine in a long time and a lot of that has to do with the innovative game play it brings to the table. Meteos and Kirby are very fun games that cannot be done as well on any other gaming platform. I’m hoping that the Wii will bring that same kind of innovative fun that the DS brought, but I’ll probably be asking the clerk at the store if they have a “New Nintendo Console” in stock and not if they have a “Wii”.
The font that they used to spell Wii looks pretty cool, though.