On Saturday 29th April 2006, Nintendo's executive vice president of sales and marketing Reggie Fils-Aime let slip that Nintendo are currently working on a racing game for its upcoming Wii system, that will be playable at E3.
"I'm going to give one little secret," Fils-Aime said. "Only one little secret, and hopefully I won't lose my job. We're going to show a racing game at E3 where you use the core controller in a very different way. That will answer all the questions to how you'll play a racing game."
The reason Reggie mentioned this, was to put gamer's minds at rest about how Nintendo's innovative new controller will be used for the racing genre.
The news has subsequently spread like wildfire and much speculation has been made, not just to how the Wii's controller will be utilized for the genre, but just what franchise it is that Nintendo is currently hard at work on?. Rumours have been rife, with speculation centering around an update to one of these classic Nintendo titles;
- Mario Kart
- F Zero
- Wave Race
- Excitebike
Now don't get me wrong, I would love to see an update to any of those classic games on the Wii, and it's obviously very likely that at some point we will.
But, and this is a big but; I believe it would wise for Nintendo to instead create a racing game that can compete and rival with Sony's (Polyphony Digital) Gran Turismo and Microsoft's (Bizarre Creations) Project Gotham Racing series.
If Nintendo is serious about bringing in new gamers to the company, then this is a market that it is almost certainly going to need to fill via one it's many first party developers, if of course it wants to attract the mainstream audience it's been itching to get hold off.
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