last year right before E3 Nintendo had several little mini videos on their E3 site. Several of NoA's more recognizable faces made appearances. Reggie's involved him looking all menacing and threatening to "take your name".
While it's not reflected in this particular thread, later threads speculated that there were hidden messages in the videos which portended the "real" announcement forthcoming a couple of days after their E3 press conference. I might be hazy on the details, I think the original conference was on Tuesday, and one of the videos said something like wait until Thursday, and some of the fake Nintendo videos on the net also implied Thursday as an important date. If you do a search for "Thursdayton", you'll probably get some interesting stuff.
Of course... nothing happened.