Nintendo Wii is 'fresh and all encompassing' says UK chief

Speaking to our sister site GamesIndustry.biz, Nintendo's UK boss David Yarnton has praised the "fresh, all-inclusive and all-encompassing" nature of the Wii name for the firm's new console, and dismissed criticism of it as "juvenile."

"What we wanted to do was to appeal to new people," he explained. "It had to be something that was fresh; while I wouldn't say it didn't have any connections, it had to be all-encompassing for people, rather than just necessarily a small user base."

Yarnton admitted that the new name will take some time to settle in with people, but insisted that the Wii announcement has created a "really good buzz".

"It's like any new name," he said, "it takes a while to get established. I think that you'll find that in not even six months, in a short period of time, people will accept it; they won't be referring to Revolution or next-generation, it'll just be Wii."

He also acknowledged criticism of the Wii name, commenting that "you can't please everyone all the time", but claimed that this criticism is not severe - even in the UK, where the name has been derided for being the same as a common children's word for urination.

"I think there are a lot of words out there like that that are used for other brands, companies and things like that - words that have different connotations and so on," he said. "I really think that if we get out of the gutter and the juvenile side of things, it's just a word. It's Wii. Actually, it's not even a word, because it's something that we've created from zero."

"I could say lots of words in a sentence that people giggle about and then carry on, but it doesn't necessarily mean that there's anything wrong with the words," he continued. "Look, we think it's a bit of fun as well - it's fine, people can have a bit of a laugh. It's part of what we're doing; what we're in is the business of creating entertainment for people to have fun. It's seemed to create quite a bit of that just in the name!"

Yarnton encouraged commentators to "look beyond just the name, at the whole philosophy of what we're about," and said that he expected people to have a very different perception of the Wii once they've played the device at E3.

Ultimately, he said, it's all about moving the product into the mass-market - a shift reflected by the name as much as by the firm's overall approach.

"There are a lot of people out there, and with the interface for DS and then moving on with the Wii controllers, it's meant to make it easy for people," he concluded, "and perhaps bring in some of those people in that normally wouldn't even think about looking at videogames."