Harrison: Nintendo May 'Retire' Game Boy

It's the most dominant handheld of all time. The Game Boy has been
practically synonymous with portable gaming, but Nintendo may actually
have retired the name, according to marketing exec George Harrison.
Also, WiiWare may be coming sooner than you think...

While Shigeru Miyamoto recently confirmed to Kotaku that Nintendo's
internal development teams have shifted their focus away from the GBA
so that they can concentrate on Wii and DS titles, Nintendo of
America's George Harrison, Senior Vice President of Marketing and
Corporate Communications, has given GameDaily BIZ a pretty strong hint
that Nintendo may be finished with the Game Boy product line.

The DS was once referred to as a "third pillar" by Nintendo, but the
handheld has been so phenomenally successful for the company that
there's little pressure to sustain the Game Boy name in future
handhelds.

"This year in our marketing you really won't see much push against
Game Boy itself, so it will kind of seek its own level. It's hard to
say in the future if we will ever bring back the Game Boy trademark,"
he told GameDaily BIZ in an E3 interview (full transcription coming
soon).

"It was a big risk for us to actually pass on it and call the new
product the Nintendo DS, but it was part of Mr. Iwata's philosophy
that if we're going to make a radical difference and try to reach a
new audience, then we have to change the name... We had to make a
break even though we had one of the greatest trademarks in the history
of the industry."

Harrison also informed us that Nintendo's WiiWare service could
actually still launch this year. When the announcement was first made,
Nintendo made it seem like we wouldn't see anything until early 2008,
but Harrison isn't ruling out 2007 entirely.

"It may not take until 2008. I've seen a couple of ideas that have
already been generated even before we went public [with WiiWare].
Whether those are going to be ready or not, I don't really know," he
said.

When pressed about WiiWare possibly taking off in 2007, he further
explained, "It really depends on the developers. If they have their
games ready and they're of an appropriate quality, then there's
nothing to stop them from launching before the end of the year. It's
just the fact that we only recently gave out the development tools and
the development specifications, so most people haven't even started
yet."

We'll provide the full interview in the near future. Harrison talks
about Wii Fit, the sales and marketing move to the Bay Area and New
York, a possible revision of Wii hardware, and more. Stay tuned!

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