Today Nintendo pulled a Nintendo and blew everyone’s minds at E3 2011. They are once again out to reinvent and redefine video gaming, and once again it looks like they might succeed. A few years from now, Microsoft and Sony will be playing “Me-too!” and coming up with some sort of dual-screen gaming setup. Remember this moment, friends, for this will be the time we can remember as “Yeah, but Nintendo invented that…”
But did they invent it? For console gaming, yes; but PC gamers have been doing the multi-monitor bit for quite some time now thanks to things like AMD’s Eyefinity, which makes multi-monitor setup about as simple as it can get.
Of course, game developers have been behind; while Eyefinity makes it possible for PC gamers to experience massive resolutions and immersively wide screens, games don’t really take advantage of the real estate. They just get bigger or present wider vistas. This is in stark contrast to the productivity application industry, where multiple displays have been a paradigm for years. Put your main interface window on one monitor and put your tools or preview box on another. It just makes sense.
It makes sense for games, too, if somebody stepped up to the plate and developed games to operate this way. This is where Nintendo is truly blazing the way.
Now that Nintendo will be bringing multi-monitor gaming to every living room, we will see a big software push for this paradigm. In a first-person shooter, for example, it makes sense for the primary display to be nothing but field-of-view while the secondary device is for HUD stuff; health, ammo, map, and whatnot. Imagine Fallout with an actual Pipboy in your hands. It just makes sense, and once you see it that way one time, you can’t really go back to the old way. HUD information takes up so much space!
Here’s what we know about the technology so far:
- IBM PowerPC architecture, just like the Wii
- A “proprietary high-density optical disc format” as well as backward-compatibility with Wii discs
- AMD GPU, most likely an R700-series
- Full 1080p support on the main screen (controller screen not yet known, but presumable 1080p so as not to change the experience)
- 6.2″ touchscreen display on controller
- Streaming HD to the controller; possibly Intel WiDi
These specs so far push this, even from a strict hardware standpoint, beyond the realm of Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Add a dash of Nintendo’s legendary creativity and we’re sure to see some mindblowing stuff in the next few years.
Yes, we’ll see the inevitable slew of casual and gimmicky titles that force us to use the controller in every possible configuration, but the third party support is a major attitude shift as well.
One thing sticks out on that list: the disc format. With the third-party titles that were announced, and taking into consideration their push into core gaming and full 1080p titles, it could be Blu-ray, which obviously puts Nintendo in a slightly awkward position. “Proprietary” can mean a lot of things though: remember when SEGA put a modified CD-ROM drive in the Dreamcast and called it GD-ROM? We’ll probably see a kind of modified Blu-ray; or maybe we’ll see the resurgence of a single, niche use of HD-DVD for this. It’s fun to speculate.
We still don’t know what the storage technology or capacity, but it’s safe to say it will probably be SD-based in order to maintain backward compatibility; besides, there’s no compelling technical reason to go beyond SD. It’s fast, it works, it’s cheap, and it holds a lot of data. (Update: confirmed. It is SD-card based and also contains 4 USB 2.0 ports).
The physical Wii U unit itself is no bigger than the original Wii, judging by the press pictures we’ve seen so far. Therefore, it has to run cool. We can expect low-power parts from AMD and IBM powering the little wonder.
We’ve also been seeing a lot of sites out there talking about one particular point and getting it totally wrong: Many sites are mentioning four Wii U new controllers per console; according to the latest press release from Nintendo, the Wii U will support one “new controller” per console. It can also power four additional Wii remotes or other standard controllers. The concept of “four different players holding tablets and playing the same game” is most likely not possible with Wii U; it very likely does not have the rendering and CPU power to draw and keep track of four completely independent 1080p displays.
It’s exciting to see what Nintendo and third-parties will do with this new paradigm. However, what’s even more exciting is knowing that this will not only change gamers’ expectations about the way games should look and operate, but developers’ as well. Once developers know that gamers expect dual-screen gaming, they will start developing titles that support it.
It’s a good time to be a gamer.
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