Originally, this topic was intended for the podcast of Friday, March 24th, 2006. Unfortunately, the podcast was never recorded due to unexpected circumstances. So, it may be a little late, but I am bringing it up anyway. Kiss my ass.
The internet is abuzz with rumors of the Nintendo Revolution being renamed the Nintendo GO before the console ships in November. The news was widely expected to debut during Satoru Iwata’s keynote speech at the Game Developers Conference. Unfortunately, he provided very little information about the name change, and instead dropped a Zelda DS title into our laps, which will be playable by E3.
The Nintendo GO, in theory, is intended to mean Nintendo Five (GO apparently means “five” in Japanese). The name change has been debated about, many fans claiming that “Revolution” is catchier. To date, we do not know if the name change will be official, although the new logo was witnessed on a presentation slide.
While the name change seems to be a step back from the Revolution (which sounded epic), I can appreciate the logo design. It features elements synonymous with previous logos. The N64 and Gamecube both featured a logo that was “three dimensional” in its design, the N64 featuring N’s forming a cube, and the Gamecube being a G formed out of a cube. However, while the cross shape is not evident in the word “GO”, it does resemble one other creation of Nintendo.
The D-pad. It has since become the universal home gaming control device, and has been on every system from the NES to the XBox 360. The fact that the D-Pad is in all directions is likely symbolic of Nintendo’s controller that functions in three dimensional space. If such is the intent, then it is certainly quite clever. Otherwise, someone just mangled a cube.
Despite all of this, I’m inclined to think this is a fake. The photo looks as if it was taken from a computer monitor, and tilted at an angle to make it appear to be a larger presentation screen. All in all, we’ll have to wait for Nintendo to say something about this before anyone can claim it is “fact”.