GameDaily BIZ: Nintendo made some interesting peripheral announcements today with Wii Fit, the Zapper, the Wheel, but there were no release dates mentioned for any of those products, correct?

George Harrison: No, not specifically. The Zapper is going to come to the U.S. market this holiday. We're working out the piece of demonstration software that we're going to pack in and once we get that sorted out we'll get the date. The Wii Fit product is going to launch in Japan this holiday, but won't come to the U.S. until early 2008.

BIZ: Have you shown these products to publishers and gotten some feedback? I'd imagine, especially with the Wii Balance Board, that it has all sorts of applications.

GH: The Zapper's been shown to the publishers and you've heard this morning that Resident Evil from Capcom and Call of Duty [from Activision] are going to take advantage of it. The Board itself really hasn't been shown to anyone outside of Nintendo, so this is really the first time we've unveiled it to the world and we'll see what kind of game ideas they can come up with but I don't think any of them are going to appear this holiday. The Board itself will be sold with the Wii Fit product initially and maybe later on will be sold alone.

BIZ: Do you have any pricing in mind that you can talk about?

GH: Clearly it will be more than just a piece of software because the board will be included, but they've got to get the real cost of the board down itself.

BIZ: I'd imagine with the third-party response, especially from companies like EA with something like SSX or Tony Hawk with skateboarding, I'm sure that Balance Board could be utilized pretty well by those products.

GH: Yeah, they were only able to show a few examples this morning, not only the aerobic and the exercise and the step kinds of things but there were some other things in there that involved skiing and ski jumping, that type of thing, so there's some fun games on there, like the one where you're on the balance board doing the hula-hoop on the board and trying to see how many you can catch and keep going.

BIZ: You've been with Nintendo for a long time, and the company was really at the top of its game in the early '90s, then went into a little bit of a lull where it wasn't quite as dominant with N64 and GameCube. Now, it would appear that you've gotten your swagger back, so to speak. So how would you compare Nintendo now to the Nintendo of the late '80s and early '90s?

GH: Well, I think in some ways, certainly in the late '80s it's very similar to where we are now. We were really groundbreaking with Atari come and gone and then all of a sudden the Nintendo NES arrived and it really was groundbreaking. People had really not seen games like Mario before and actually there were many people, not just not just teenagers playing, but we probably stayed too long with what we do well in the '90s and tastes began to change a little bit here in the U.S. as you saw and that gave an opening to people like Sony and ultimately to Microsoft. In some ways, it was liberating because we realized we don't want to and don't feel we can go head-to-head because we're not making Grand Theft Auto, we're not making games like that, it's not what Nintendo does. It caused us to think differently and look at this expanded audience and try to say, "You know what? There are a lot of people that don't play games. Let's go try to figure out what they like and how we can get them involved." And that involved the changing of the interface, how you actually interact with the game, from the DS stylus to the Zapper to the Wheel for Mario Kart, and then the nature of the games, the development type games like the brain games and things. A few years ago, people would not even have considered them to be video games and would have never even thought to make them for our systems.

BIZ: Everyone knows the story of how Nintendo almost partnered with Sony, but it didn't happen and then Sony made the PlayStation. Do you ever wonder how this industry might be different if Sony and Nintendo had come together on a CD-based console?

GH: Well ironically, that was just as I was arriving at Nintendo, March 1992. That very first show, I think it was a CES show in May or June, is when we decided at the last moment to pull the plug on that relationship, but I didn't know enough at that point to really understand the reasons why or even the implications. But I think in the end, we're better off working independently. Even having to work outside to develop our hardware, we've shown that we can develop hardware profitably and retain control of the innovation that we like to do in the software area.

BIZ: Let's talk a little bit about WiiWare. The Wii is finally going to be getting some original downloadable titles in addition to all the classics you have on the Virtual Console, and of course it seems somewhat similar to Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network. How in your view will WiiWare differentiate itself from the PlayStation Network offerings and the Xbox Live Arcade offerings?

GH: What I've seen so far on Xbox Live Arcade, they've poured out a lot of PC casual type games, things that you can already see on Pogo and other types of things. We're hoping that WiiWare will open up the opportunity to really do some new ideas, and people that might not have the biggest budgets or can't always get the attention of publishers to get a retail distribution of their product can try out some ideas. Things that we've tried recently like Electroplankton, a music based game which we showed a year ago I think at E3, probably wasn't really a big enough idea to go to retail; we tried to sell it just online but it was kind of difficult. So I think there's got to be an outlet where those kinds of games can test the audience and see if there's any type of traction there. So we're hoping that it will spawn a whole new level of creativity.

BIZ: Is there a reason why it's taking so long? It's not scheduled to start until early next year, so it's a long wait.

GH: Well, actually in June, we unveiled the existence of it and we provided the tools at a developers conference. So it'll take some time but it may not take until 2008. I've seen a couple of ideas that had already been generated even before we went public. Whether or not those are going to be ready to go, I don't really know.

BIZ: So you're saying there's an actual possibility that the WiiWare could launch?

GH: Yeah, it really depends on the developers. If they have their games ready and they are of appropriate quality, there's nothing to stop them from launching before the end of the year. It's just the fact that we only recently gave out the development tools and all the development specifications and most people have not even started yet.