It's the start of Day 2 of the annual DICE Summit, and Alex Rigopulos has just given a presentation where he told a bleary-eyed early morning audience about the rise of Harmonix. Many of the attendees are tired and hoarse from overdoing it at the previous night's awards ceremony. Still, the very organized, single-track nature of DICE allows for its attendees to just sit back, relax and learn a little more about the fascinating industry we work in. The morning presentation has run a bit long after an already late start, and I have to race to make my appointment.

It's not long before I arrive at the upstairs caf¿, and wait to interview Nintendo® Vice-President of Marketing & Corporate Affairs, Perrin Kaplan. The plan is to talk shop and maybe learn a bit about Nintendo®'s strategy going forward in 2007. Shortly after I grab a table, Perrin arrives, and she is clearly ready for a busy day of interviews and meetings, wheeling her luggage directly to her seat. As we get ready to begin, she mentions that while she ordered a lightly-dressed Tuscan salad, she'd much rather be having one of the caf¿'s remarkably enormous hot fudge sundaes.



GameSpy: Thanks for meeting with me here at DICE. I'm curious to know how you feel about the state of industry trade shows now that E3 as we knew it is no longer.
Nintendo® Vice-President of Marketing & Corporate Affairs, Perrin Kaplan: I think every show is different, and a show like the Game Developers Conference has a completely different function than the DICE summit. And E3 had a different function from either of those, but E3 also got out of control. At least from the perspective of a hardware and software maker…
GameSpy:… and from the perspective of the gaming press.
Perrin Kaplan: Right. It was difficult in terms of the distance that people had to run between meetings, with no time to grab something to eat, and the halls being too far apart and then we had to build a two-story booth every year. The show's purpose was essentially a buying show, for retailers, and so many retailers said that "we're not going to come and have meetings, the show is just too big." So we'll see what the new version will look like this year.
GameSpy: So the holidays are over, and we can now look back on the launch of the Nintendo® Wii. How well did it really go for Nintendo®?
Perrin Kaplan: It's been fantastic. We're in awe that consumers have embraced it so readily, and that such a wide audience has embraced it, from core gamers to their grandmas. That's pretty cool, and really hard to achieve with any product. So while the launch occurred, and did very well for us, from our perspective the work has only begun. We have to remind ourselves that there are still so many people that have yet to experience Wii Sports and have yet to really understand what the Wii is about. We have to keep our nose to the grindstone and make sure that as many people as possible hear about the Wii, and have the chance to experience it. That's the key, because once you experience it, that's when you really understand.
GameSpy: What launch title do you feel is more responsible for the Wii's success thus far? Is it Wii Sports, or is it The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess?
Perrin Kaplan: Boy, that's a really hard question. The expanded user, the new people, they enjoy Wii Sports first and maybe ventured into Zelda. All the people who are core gamers bought Zelda, and that's a pretty wide group. But you, the enthusiasts, experienced Wii Sports too, since it was packed in with the system. So I have to say it was two different audiences that the games appealed to, which combined to lead to a successful launch lineup.