Nintendo's announcement overnight of a black Wii and a red DSi being scheduled for the Japanese market, got us wondering about those new colors coming to America. Who better to answer this than the president of Nintendo of America?
"We don't have anything to announce for the U.S. on either of those products," Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime told Kotaku this morning. "We know that it will be reacted to quite positively in Japan.. but no news for the Americas markets for those two products."
We asked about the inevitability of new colors of the Wii coming to America, especially given that Nintendo had shown the Wii in multiple colors as far back as E3 2005.
"There's a difference between showing different colors and making the product announcement that new colors are coming," Fils-Aime said. "We have shown a plethora of colors in the past for the Wii. We have shown a wide range of colors for the DS. From an Americas perspective, colors do drive the business. We've shown that, for example, with the lighter blue DSi that we thought was a nice complement to the black. So there will be more colors for various hardware.
"In the end, for us, it's all about: how do we time it? How do we leverage it, ideally with software? In Japan, linking [the black Wii] with the launch of Monster Hunter Tri [from Capcom] is why that announcement was made and why that's being positioned as it is."
While Fils-Aime said that Tri is coming to the U.S., he wasn't ready to talk about black Wiis or Wiis of any other hue.