February 23^rd, 2006 (2:32pm) - In an interview with Engadget, Reggie Fils-Aime, Nintendo of America’s executive vice president of sales and marketing, has revealed that most game development studios should be able to get their grimy mitts on Revolution development kits easily, as over one thousand of them have already been shipped out, a staggeringly high number.

"We have shipped over a thousand controller dev kits to developers so that they can begin getting experience with the controller mechanics," Fils-Aime stated.

Following up on this report is IGN Revolution, who has contacted a number of studios to delve deeper into the situation regarding possible games in development for Nintendo’s next-generation console. IGN has discovered that most of the earlier dev kits shipped to developers were in fact GameCube SDKs with a Revolution controller attached to them and not the best representation of the console’s actual hardware. The second revision of the dev kit was also relatively the same with a few minor tweaks here and there, and the third kit, which is said to have been shipped to developers about a month, features a boost in CPU power.

It is also being reported that some of the bigger game companies, which include Electronic Arts and Ubisoft, have received a more complete version of the Revolution SDK, which feature internal hardware that is more akin to the actual capabilities of the console and a wireless Revolution controller. Additionally, those big name software houses, who will have playable Revolution software at E3 this May, will be sent yet another, more final SDK that will deliver ninety to ninety-five percent of the console’s actual performance.

When asked if whether or not the Revolution’s graphical capabilities were up to snugg, one of IGN’s sources claimed that it wasn’t necessarily intergral to the Revolution experience. "At first, we were discouraged that it would be less powerful than Xbox 360, but once we got everything working with the controller, our concerns faded," he explained. This sort of enthusiasm has been common amongst developers working with the platform.

The final Revolution development kits are expected to be available this June, which should be just in time to put the finishing touches on the console’s launch window games -- a launch which is expected to come this fall.

In comparison to the pricing of development kits, the Revolution SDKs sell for about two-thousand dollars, which is thousands of dollars cheaper than PSP SDK and one could only image how much cheaper it is to developer games for the Revolution compared to the Xbox 360 and PS3.