November 9^th, 2005 (4:22pm) - Jim Merrick, Nintendo of Europe’s senior vice president of marketing, is the man to come to for any new and significant information regarding Nintendo’s next-generation game console, code-named Revolution. At Nintendo’s European Summit in Frankfurt, Eurogamer.net sat down with Merrick and once again some new details regarding the console has surfaced.

The main focus of this European summit was to allow the press to become accustomed to the Nintendo WiFi Connection, and when asked about the possibility of seeing a Nintendo developed MMO for the DS or Revolution, Merrick said that "it’s certainly possible... It really depends on Mr Miyamoto and Mr Konno, and whether they see that vision."

In regards to the "virtual console" downloadable game service we keep hearing about, Merrick reconfirmed that these downloadable games will be stored on the Revolution’s 512MB of flash memory, which he confirmed to be expandable. Additionally, Merrick also confirmed what many fans have been hoping to be more than just a rumor, and that is the availability of third-party games as downloadable games for this virtual console service. However, Merrick did not reveal which third parties would be contributing their back catalog, only saying that "I think you can guess [which publishers]" he added. "The usual suspects."

Nintendo’s online plans for the Revolution don’t end there, of course. Merrick also revealed that it’ll be possible for users to "download movies or demos of games that would expire in 30 days, or a [full] game that you could share with another person." Although, by movies and music, Merrick means game trailers or in-game music samples. He addressed that Nintendo is not looking to compete with Microsoft and Sony in creating a console that acts a "multimedia hub."

When the Revolution’s controller was revealed at the Tokyo Game Show, one of the game developers to speak about the controller and its possibilities was Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima. Since Kojima has been very vocal about his interest in developing games for the console, Eurogamer asked Merrick if Kojima-san is indeed developing for the console since his comments imply that he is. Merrick responded with "that would imply that, yes." He also added, "I think in his comments he stopped short of saying what game he was working on, so again, as a third party it’s his privilege to say what he’s doing." So, is Kojima developing a game for the Revolution? "To my knowledge, yes," Merrick said.

In response to the comments of Epic Games’ Mark Rein, which were rather hateful towards the Revolution and its controller, Merrick said the following:

Mark has a very narrow section of the business. Epic builds middleware, they’re very technically savvy guys, but he doesn’t have a Revolution controller, he doesn’t have a dev kit, he’s talking about something he knows nothing about. So if he’d like to get a dev kit and really dig into it, then I’d be interested to hear what he has to say.

To read the entire article click on the following link:
http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=61604