November 15^th, 2005 (3:41pm) - At a recent IGN event, Epic Games’s Mark Rein had some rather harsh words to say about the controller of Nintendo’s upcoming Revolution game console, saying that the controller would inspire developers to produce "gimmicky, crappy, cheap, I-wish-I-hadn’t-bought-it games." Soon after hearing this, Nintendo of Europe’s senior vice president of marketing, Jim Merrick, responded to Rein’s comments, saying that Rein is "talking about something he knows nothing about." Merrick then said he would like to see what Rein would say about the console once Epic actually had development kits for the console that they could dig into. Well, Epic may take Nintendo up on this "challenge."

In a recent article, GamesIndustry.biz sat down with Epic Game’s Mark Rein and asked the Epic Games president about his comments regarding the Nintendo Revolution and Jim Merrick’s response to these comments. Rein suggested that his comments were taken out of context.

"I actually said Nintendo’s going to make amazing games. I never really passed a judgment on the controller itself. I think the controller’s cool!" He added, "I wasn’t bashing Nintendo, I wasn’t bashing the controller, I was really just saying that a by-product of having a device like this is that people are going to make games that possibly are just there because of the controller, as opposed to being great games of themselves, and I said it badly... I regret that."

Rein admits that he expects many great games to be created for Nintendo’s next-generation console that makes good use of the controller.

"Nintendo and some of the best third parties are going to make amazing games for it," he said.

When Merrick’s comments were first revealed online, Rein just so happened to come across the article and proceeded to call Merrick about eachother’s comments. Rein said, that "we had a long, very good chat." Not only this, but Rein said he would love to take up Merrick’s challenge and see what the Revolution could by receiving a dev kit of the machine. "I told him we’ve absolutely love to take him up on that," he added. However, Rein made sure to mention that this does not mean that Epic has signed up to develop for the Revolution.

Rein also added that he thinks the "Unreal Engine 3 and Nintendo Revolution would be very well suited to each other."

"We don’t know right now what the machine’s capable of or not capable of, and we’ve built Unreal Engine 3 to a certain specification. If the machine can run the engine, it’d be fantastic to have it on there."

Does this mean Epic Games will develop games for the Revolution? Not necessarily but hopefully we’ll have answers to these questions and more within the coming months.