Nintendo Wii Fanboy

Nintendo has welcomed with open arms a pair of new executives to head up positions at the company's new offices in Redwood City. The first new employee is Denise Kaigler, who will serve as vice president of Marketing & Corporate Affairs and take over for Perrin Kaplan. Kaigler will handle corporate communications, public relations, government affairs, investor and analyst relations, and internal communications for Nintendo of America. She will also have her hands in on the global coordination of the company.

The other new addition to the team is Bill Van Zyll. Zyll will be the new director and general manager of Latin America. Zyll comes from a 15 year stint at the Whirlpool Corporation, where he handled a variety of duties and even got some experience working in Latin America. This will no doubt help him transition into his new position at Nintendo.

Chris Kohler of Game|Life interviewed Nintendo of America VP George Harrison about the future of the Wii system, and his responses were, well, generally unsurprising. We wouldn't expect Nintendo to suddenly change their strategy in the midst of such success.

Harrison said that because of the high prices of the Wii's competitors, he expected the Wii to have a lifecycle longer than the traditional five years. (Would that mean more than 35 million installed units in the US?) And it'll continue to have a pack-in for some of that lifecycle, since Wii Sports is a "cultural phenomenon" that is helping to draw people in to the system.

Harrison also mentioned that more Wii software targeted at Nintendo's new "expanded" audience would be revealed at E3, and that a game download channel is in development.

There's more, including some weird comments about localizing Virtual Console games and a response to the continuing shortages. Go read the whole thing, if you are so inclined.

The success of the Wii has Nintendo feeling pretty confident about themselves. They've sold about 2.5 million units since launch, and probably would have sold more if there had been more.

Naturally, the six months following launch are completely representative of the console's whole life cycle, which is why Nintendo of America VP George Harrison, in a statement to Bloomberg, was confident enough to predict that the United States would have an install base of 35 million Wiis by 2012.

We aren't business experts, but we think Harrison might be committing a Disco Stu Fallacy here. "Did you know that disco record sales were up 400% for the year ending 1976? If these trends continue...ayyyyy!"

This morning, at the Nintendo Media Summit, NoA President and resident badass Reggie Fils-Aime had some interesting statistics on the Nintendo juggernaut. While a lot of it may not be the best news for the hardcore gaming contingent, the massive revenue increases indicate that the wider potential market may well be what powers the industry in the coming years. One particularly telling statement backed up the figures: "We don't consider Sony and Microsoft as our only competitors. We're competing with other leisure time entertainment. If people stay at home and play Wii bowling instead of going to the movies, we win."

It's not all gloom and doom for the hardest of the hard, however. Reggie had some interesting things to say about this summer's highly anticipated Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. It "will reinvent the control scheme for a first person shooter. It's the closest you can get to PC control in a [console] game." A lot of people hoped Red Steel would pull that off for the Wii at launch, but leave it to Nintendo to really show us what the Wiimote and nunchuk combo can do for the FPS.

Reggie also added that the DS continues to print money, just in case none of us knew.

NoA president (and popular photoshop subject) Reggie Fils-Aime made a special guest appearance on phones and answering machines across America yesterday. If you pre-ordered a Wii at GameStop, you got the message included after the jump. If you didn't ... you can still hear it!

Nothing like getting a recorded message from Reggie to make the waiting a little easier.