In the videogame industry version of silly season - which synchronises quite nicely with the newspaper original (i.e. summer) - even gossip and speculation are more scarce than reliable English penalty takers. So writers are forced to improvise. A couple of weeks ago, a French videogame site allegedly claimed to have plied an unnamed Nintendo exec with enough booze to get him to reveal the Wii launch date - as early as October 30 in Japan, but possibly November, he is reported to have slurred.
Now, a new Wii launch story has kicked off over in the States. The big 'news' is that children's magazine, Sports Illustrated for Kids, has revealed the US delivery date in an otherwise innocuous gaming feature. Here, there's even a specific day: November 6. I like this take on the 'announcement' if only because the scan of said publication is as blurry as the story itself.
This, of course, is another take on the videogame magazine trick of perusing Amazon and Play for freshly inputted videogame release dates then printing the result as 'news' - the thinking being that big online retailers must enjoy a close relationship with game publishers and therefore the dates must be accurate. This constitutes investigative journalism in some quarters. In the long slow summer months, a mainstream magazine taking a guess at a console launch date, is something of coup.
This also speaks volumes about the insecurity of the videogame press. The assumption is thus: Sports Illustrated For Kids is a mainstream consumer magazine so its information must be accurate - it must have a mainline to Nintendo HQ, which is closed off to lesser specialist publications.
Or maybe everyone knows it's a misprint, but plays along anyway. A self-facilitating rumour mill.
Whichever way you look at it, it's no more or less credible than tales of drunken execs blurting out company secrets. I'm certainly looking forward to the next source of a wildly improbable Wii launch announcement. Hey, it could even come from Nintendo.
