Nintendo Wii Fanboy

Hey, if they are, we haven't seen any of them.

Store shelves are barren, with only a fine film of dust to rest atop their usually proud selves. Online retailers often respond to requests to purchase a console with nothing more than a "404 - You're boned" or "Ha Ha." All searches for the console have come up fruitless, often leaving one in such a sad state that suicide is not only considered, but seen as a better fate.

Well, apparently Nintendo has been manufacturing quite a bit of the beautiful white console that could. George Harrison, who is due to call it quits anytime now, said that the company is pumping out 1.8 million units a month, commenting "We're at a rate now worldwide of about 1.8 million Wiis produced every month, and that's going to sustain itself until we get on top of this." He adds that Nintendo analyzes supply distribution every few weeks, citing that it is an "embarrassment of opportunity."

[Via 1UP]

Nintendo's George Harrison could be packing up his things and taking an early retirement, says GameDaily, as the Senior Vice President of Marketing and Corporate Communications apparently left an internal voice message declaring his intentions of never working again. Of course, he could have just meant he was leaving Nintendo to pursue another opportunity in the industry (or outside of it), but we can't possibly imagine anyone ever wanting to leave Nintendo. Seriously, why would he want to do that?

Keep your eyes glued to Wii Fanboy for further news on this story as it develops.

Nintendo's SVP of Marketing and Corporate Communications, George Harrison, conducted an interview with GameDaily during E3 where he spoke on a number of subjects (seriously, this interview is long). What we were interested in hearing from the interview, however, was talk of a Wii revision to the hardware in the works. George, in expert fashion, manages to provide an "answer" to the question without really answering it.

George doesn't completely dash our hopes of a bigger, badder Wii, though (we'd like more space to save our VC games, please!), stating "whenever we feel like it's time or have an upgrade, we'll do it, whether it's an improved screen for the handheld or slimmed down like the DS Lite – those types of things. So it's not out of the question on Wii, but we're not even to our second holiday yet, so it's kind of premature to talk about any revisions to the hardware itself." So, by that logic, we'll see a new Wii in 2009?

Regardless of what we may have heard, it would seem that Beth Llewelyn (senior director of public relations), Perrin Kaplan (vice president of marketing and corporate affairs) and George Harrison (senior vice president of marketing and corporate communications) haven't decided to take severance pay from the company.

Or, at least, they haven't told Nintendo they plan on leaving, as Pro-G found out when contacting Nintendo on some sort of confirmation regarding this mess. "In terms of the execs you name leaving we have not heard anything regarding that speculation (and it remains speculation) and we aren't commenting further on those rumours at this time," Nintendo commented.

So, what does this all mean? Not much, right now. These top execs could still be leaving Nintendo, but we'll have to wait for official word from Nintendo before this matter is resolved.

[Via Joystiq]

George Harrison, Nintendo's senior vice president of marketing, apparently didn't appreciate the accusation from Gamestop COO Dan DeMatteo that Nintendo was strategically waiting until the start of the new fiscal year to ship out more Wiis. He countered with something that seems a lot less corporate cloak-and-dagger, and a lot more common sense: Nintendo is, in fact, selling a whole lot of Wiis in three regions, and that is why there's a perceived shortage.

Harrison went on to speculate that DeMatteo's comments were an attempt to get some of the Wii supply diverted to Gamestop. You'd think he would have learned a lesson about such speculating from the very thing he's responding to, but perhaps we're expecting too much.

[Via Game|Life]