The spirit of light-hearted fun for which Japanese game maker Nintendo is famous seems to have infected its PR company (finally) as well. The company issued a press release yesterday announcing its product release dates for the remainder of 2006, but with a twist.
In addition to the usual sunshine blown up the kiester intermixed with cold, hard facts, Nintendo inserted this gem:
Perhaps the secret to the launch information for Wii is somehow encoded in the text of this news item. You might want to pore over it for a few hours before staying up all night to debate phraseology and comma placement with your friends online.
But when it came time to announce the release date for Zelda: Twilight Princess for the Wii (and the Wii itself) the press release states:
That will all happen on … Oh look, we’re out of space.
Cute. Ars Technica offers a solution to the code (cribbed from Gaming Target). I could bore you with the details, but instead I’ll just throw my hat in and agree with them. It’s coming out on October 2nd.
Nintendo has reason to feel positive of late, having sold over 20 million DS units and expanded their earnings forecast, but if history has shown us anything it’s that clever marketing gimmicks and fantastically innovative ideas won’t save a console from dying an early death if there aren’t any good games being made to play on it. Let’s hope Nintendo learned that lesson well the last time.
Twilight Princess may be a console-mover, but we’re going to need more steady releases than they offered for the GameCube to make the Wii look like a sure thing, even at $249.
