I can understand the concerns that traditional gamers have. I share them. But the proof isn't in the punditry, it's in the pudding.
Hopefully, anyone who's going to ever take a risk on something that isn't proven 100% beforehand realizes that. For example, focus groups hated playing Mario Bros. on the NES, retailers didn't want to stock the system, and videogames were a cultural faux pas in america at the time. There are, of course, many more failures than successes when undertaking such risks, but the point is that if you don't try something new and daring and perhaps even untested, you'll never be able to expand, innovate, challenge, or redefine anything.
As a Nintendo fan, I take it that Nintendo isn't that kind of company. Satoru Iwata said that Nintendo doesn't want to be seen as a company that avoids risk. They want to be seen as a company that is willing to take risks. That'd the company I believe in, one that challenges me to grow and learn and be some place I've never been before. This is the company that made vines grow out of invisible blocks, that made controllers shake in my hands, has me doing 100 simple math problems in quick succession, and that has kept me feeling young and alive all my 22 years.
They're not perfect, they never were. But I don't ask them to be perfect. I ask them to to take risks, and show me something new that I've never seen before.
That's the sort of company I believe Nintendo to be. And that's why the name makes sense to me: it's a risk, it has negatives and positives, things i dig (like the playfulness, the oddity of it) and things i think are clunky (the pronounciation-breaking double - ii, the lack of any hard sounds whatsoever), but it's a chance to look at the world around me in a completely new light.
Nintendo's taking a risk at something new, and I think that's a good thing in any Nintendo fan's book.
You think Nintendo is in danger, but, crisis and opportunity are after all inextricably intertwined. And what greater crisis than Nintendo's current predicament? What greater opportunity than Wii?
~Carmine M. Red
Kairon@aol.com