Iwata on DS and Revolution at GDC @ Gaming Target

Written by John Scalzo on March 10, 2005

News: Nintendo President lets some details out of the bag.

Nintendo President Satoru Iwata gave his keynote speech at this year's Game Developer's Conference and used the oppurtunity to reveal a lot of new details about the DS' Wi-Fi capabilities and some concrete details about the Revolution.

First off, Iwata announced that the DS Wi-Fi network will go live later this year. He also announced that one of the first games to take advantage of this world-connected network will be Animal Crossing DS.

Iwata also revealed the first bits of official news about the Revolution to the GDC audience. First, the system will be completely backwards compatible with the GameCube. This also probably puts to rest once and for all that ridiculous "The Revolution won't have a d-pad!" rumor. But you never can tell with Nintendo.

The Revolution will also feature Wi-Fi capability right out of the box allowing players to connect to any other Revolution user around the globe. Now that Nintendo has finally joined the online revolution, they're doing it in a big way. The processing chip for the Revolution is currently known as Broadway and is being developed by IBM while the graphics chip (like the Xbox Next) will come from ATI. It is code-named "Hollywood."

"This is Nintendo's plan: make our existing game world better," Iwata said. "For us, this is a passion. This is a mission of adventure."