Once upon a time, there was a company named SCO. SCO had a problem - more and more people weren't using its software. It had tried the "usual" things, like "making their product better", but that didn't seem to work. Then, they decided to sell another product called "Linux" - but in a very competitive market, that didn't seem to work either.

Then they decided something: Linux, SCO started telling everyone, actually belongs to them.

Different people in the Linux community just went "Huh?". You see, Linux was made by a man named Linus (in fact, Linux means something like "Linus's Unix"), and he based his idea on what he had seen from something called Minux. Minux was based on Unix, and Unix had been given away back in the early 1980's.

But SCO claimed that Unix belonged to them, and because of that, Linux belonged to them, and therefore everyone using Linux owed them $650 for every copy of Linux they owned.

"But we rewrote Linux from scratch, so there's no Unix inside of it," the Linux community said.

"No, we can see that there are parts of our code in your Linux, so Linux belongs to us," SCO said.

Look, MS - we know you love those micropayments. We get it. It's the only way the Xbox series will ever become profitable. At the same time, we paid for your Xbox Live Gold service, so I expect that if a publisher wants to put up some fraking free maps, you should let them do it and get out of the way.

So how did the developers respond? By actually being cool and releasing a cheat code to unlock all of the songs and asking for more feedback to make better games!

Or, you could be like Vicarious Visions and build the Wii version of Spider-Man 3 from the ground up with tightly integrated controls for web slinging and fighting, and extras (like how the black Spider-Man suit gives him more powers, but has a bad drug addiction like quality about it).

Let's look at the situation:

Part 1: The Wii was suppose to flop.

I don't know if anyone remember when the Wii was announced, but it was during the tail end of the Gamecube. Remember the Gamecube? It's a system that had nice graphics and a few good games, but it did "OK" - profitable for Nintendo, but barely tied (or beat, depending on who you ask) the Xbox, which certainly got more market share of mental thought (how many sitcoms had kids playing a PS2 or Xbox opposed to a Gamecube? Right - I never saw the latter even talked about, while the Xbox was mentioned on NBC shows like "Will and Grace" quite a bit). Unlike the PS2, nobody was camping out overnight for a Gamecube.

Now, you're a developer. You have a game. The PS2 has 50,000,000 sales, the Xbox 10,000,000 (and growing everywhere save Japan), the Gamecube has nearly the same amount as the Xbox but less in Europe and more in Japan. You're going to make a game for the 360 (because it's coming out first and has Power), then the PS3 (because everybody "knows" it's going to win), and maybe that weird Wii thing when you get around to it.

Then what happens - the 360 sells pretty well (save in Japan, where it takes a year for Microsoft to get their thumb out of their ass and make Japanese games that they'd actually play) - and the Wii explodes! It's fucking everywhere! What the hell is going on - and the PS3 is being out sold by this little device, and not only is it being out sold, but Nintendo can't keep it in stock!

So you're a developer - you're Plan A (360) is working all right, but Plan B (PS3 to dominate) is going down the toilet.

Solution? Get porting like crazy. If you're EA, turn an entire plant in Utah from making PC games to making Wii games. If you're Capcom, take that PSP Alien Syndrome game and get it onto the Wii, and while you're at it, that Gamecube Resident Evil 4 game will work as well. (Though I wonder where the hell Okami for the Wii is.)

It takes nearly a full year for a game to get made with quality, and I think November was a huge "Holy shit!" on behalf of developers and publishers. Only Ubisoft really supported the Wii at first (Red Steel as so-so, while Raving Rabbids was a blast) - and they've got more stuff coming out.

I expect the ports to continue, and I expect a lot of crappy ones (more on this in Part 3 below). But developers have had barely 5, 6 months to discover that the Wii is a hot thing, so you're not going to see diddly/squat from them until at *least* September/November of this year anyway, while they try to figure out what the hell they're going to do with all of this PS3 stuff they need to put aside until PS3 sales match expectations.

Part 2: OMG! All these Gamecube games are ported to the Wii! Nintendo is dying!

There was an interesting article on 4 Color Rebellion. One of the guys is a teacher, and was listening in on some of his fellow teachers talking about the Wii. One of them was getting Animal Crossing for his Wii. One of the other teachers said "Oh, yeah - you just buy the Gamecube version of that and it will play!"

"What's a Gamecube?" the other teacher responded.

Nintendo knows this. Remember how Zelda was going to be the last big Gamecube game, Paper Mario was going to be a Gamecube game, Kirby and so on? Nintendo *knows* that most people don't know what the hell a Gamecube is. My neighbor was asking me what to get his kids, and I mentioned the Gamecube. He gave me a glassy eyed stare. I said a Wii, and he went "Oh, yeah! OK!"

Wii has name recognition. Grandma Betsy doesn't know that you can play Gamecube games on the Wii, and unless the store person has half a brain cell and can tell them, neither can most parents. So Nintendo is porting these games over to the Wii because it has the name recognition. "New Wii game!" the stores say, and people go "Oh - I know what a Wii is. Hey - it's Mario!"

They don't know the graphics are "old" and "Gamecube quality". It looks good enough for them, it makes Nintendo money, done.

Part 3: Anybody remember the DS?

Remember the DS? I do. I remember when it came out, there were lots of complaints about the touch screen controls being "tacked on". In some cases, these were valid complaints. Super Mario 64 DS is a piece of shit. I'm sorry, it is - Mario walks too slow for a platformer (unless you either use the Run button, and then he's hard to control). The touch screen controls were just awful. I liked the idea of having Yoshi and Luigi and Wario with different abilities, but the controls were "tacked on".

But then Nintendo figured it out. Then the third parties figured it out, like Atlus with their super sweet "Trauma Center". I played that game so much I couldn't fondle my wife's ass because my hand had been turned into a giant claw.

It took nearly a year for 3rd parties to stop "taking on" the DS controls onto the games. Hell, even now we still see it (the recent Wario game? Yeah - that's tacked on for ya').

Then there's the online component. It really wasn't until Tetris DS and Animal Crossing showed up that the online system for the DS even seemed to work at all. Yeah, there's friend codes. I don't mind them, only because I'm a father of three and I don't want my kids chatting with Joe Pedophile - I know the codes come from people only they or I know. So if it's on the Wii like that, fine. When they're old enough to hear 12 year olds call them mother-rapers and that they're going to cut their throat and jerk down the hole, then I'll get them a 360. Until then, friend codes are a parent's best friend for online gaming.

My bet is the Wii will go through the same things. Developers will do what they know at first (especially those who are time pressured to get something OUT THE DOOR RIGHT NOW WE'RE LOSING MONEY). Then they'll go "Hey - I have an idea on how we can use this for an Indiana Jones game". Or a better kind of Cooking Mama. Or - who knows.

Personally, I'm content. My kids and I are playing Wario, I'm working on my Zelda Twilight Princess walkthrough on my website, Paper Mario comes out soon, and I've still got a good collection of Gamecube games I haven't played (like Metroid Prime II). This summer looks pretty decent, the online stuff is coming together (slowly, but like the DS, surely). And by the end of the year everybody will look back and go "Man, the Wii first games were crap".

Just like the DS. And the 360. And the PS2.

Part 4: It's only been 5 months! Yeah. It's selling out everywhere. It's getting news all over. Old people are buying it to play in retirement homes. It's controllers are still selling out in a lot of places. And, it's been barely 5 months since it came out. Wario Wario, Raving Rabbids, Zelda, Wii Play, and the upcoming "Super Paper Mario" are selling pretty damn well.

It's the interface. When I play a game on my DS, I consider there are really only 3 ways to play a DS game:

• Directional and lettered buttons Buttons
• Stylus only
• Buttons with one hand, stylus with the other

The problem with Spectrobes is it expects you to use the stylus when you're doing some things, and the buttons in others. So you start by tapping the screen and loading your game with the stylus. Then you have to run around and fight using only the buttons. Then you use the stylus to manipulate your Spectrobes.

Granted, you probably could use only the buttons, but the game doesn't tell you this. It starts off with "Touch the screen!".

I think what happened is he thought he could do no wrong. There's a great line from "Macrolife" where someone says something like "Failure is better than success. Success just teaches you to do the same thing over and over. Failure teaches you to try new things."

The PSOne and PS2 did very, very well - the PSOne took advantage of CD technology, the PS2 took advantage of DVD technology. The rest - the chip and so on - was really just gravy. Remember how "difficult" the PS2 was to develop for? Well, it didn't matter - it was a good DVD player, it was backwards compatible, so by the time the developers plowed through and figured it out, the backwards compatibility kept it afloat.

The PS3 really just does the same thing - bigger disk again, bigger chips again, backwards compatibility - it's PS2 evolved bigger, and evidently even *more* difficult to program for.

Microsoft failed with the Xbox. Now, I know - "They outsold the Gamecube"! Yes, they did. And they lost $4 billion doing it. If you have to go into debt to "outsell" your competitor, you have failed. But failure *helped* Microsoft with the 360. They went back to the drawing board. They made it harder to hack - it's taken almost 18 months to get to "Hello, World" - and while there are DVD firmware cracks, that's a lot harder than "Load 'Splinter Cell' and load this save game file". They made it easier to program for, so you can practically make a Windows game and port it to the Xbox. They made their online system even better.

Failure made Nintendo better. They went back to the Gamecube and rethought how to do things - new controller, fairly cheap library of games to download, easy for developers to work on. Make it more energy efficient, and make it so affordable that Grandma in her retirement home would want to buy.

Ken was successful twice in a row, and he made the same mistake Nintendo did in the 90's, the same mistake Steve Jobs did in the late 80's: they was so successful they didnt' realize they could fail. Nintendo crashed hard with the N64, Jobs crashed hard with Next. Both picked themselves up, dusted themselves off, and changed and became successful again. (Before the Fanboys pop up - yes, I know Nintendo still made a profit with the N64. They still failed by losing their huge market share. Thank you.)

Ken may fail with the PS3 - but hopefully, he'll learn. Maybe the PS4 will be still bigger but Sony will decide to just go for the high end market. Maybe it will spark new thinking and ideas that we can't even imagine. Sadly, if this information is accurate - that Ken put his pride first in hiding accounting details from the company and ignoring advice - he might not be the one to lead to the next generation.