Rumor: Wii in HD

by Adam Berger

You had had the time to wait online, drop a few Benjamins, and settle in with your respective next-gen gaming system, whether it be a Wii, PS3, or 360, but you just had to know that eventually your system would be out-of-date. Unlike previous generations (PSOne, PS2, Xbox, Game Cube, etc) these machines can be upgraded with new firmware and added capabilities over the internet, and at some point in time the hardware receives upgrades. Given the Blu-ray drive in the PS3, I expect that we won’t see many changes/additions over its life-cycle except for a larger hard drive and a decrease in size. The Xbox 360 may receive an internal hard drive and internal HD-DVD player to compete head-on with the PS3. What is in question is the Wii. Nintendo Of America president Reggie Fils-Aime dropped an interesting quote in a USA Today article:

“Tough choices about not including a DVD player at the start, tough choices about not including high-definition capability at the start. That’s because we wanted a mass-market price, and we believe the market will validate those decisions come launch day on this Sunday,” Fils-Aime said.

The key phrase here is “at the start.” Wiis currently cannot play DVD movies, but Nintendo has already confirmed that a new model will be able to in the latter half of 2007 (in Japan at least) — not that big of a deal considering most people have DVD players (originally thanks to the PS2 as well as the sub-$50 prices. I believe there will be a major upgrade of the Wii to a next-gen HD format as well as a HD firmware update of 720p/1080i/1080p support once the format war becomes more clear. Do not confuse this with an official announcement from Nintendo, just my speculation. Even though the company is looking to bring on the “casual gamer,” it just so happens that this person is likely to have an HDTV within the next two years and Nintendo will be the only one on the market without a pretty looking picture.

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