Thank you for taking a few minutes to chat with me today, I know you have a very busy schedule right now. One of the first things I wanted to ask you about is the new Nintendo DS Lite which was announced in Japan a couple of weeks ago. Is this what the DS should have been when it was first introduced back in 2004?

When the DS was first announced our focus really was on communicating to consumers and to developers the innovation that’s in that unit: two screens, a touch screen, voice activation. And we’ve certainly done that to the tune of multi-millions of units sold across the world. We really a leadership position in every market we compete in versus our competition.

In terms of the physical unit itself, from the day we first showed pictures we’ve been ongoing making tweaks and adjustments, looking to get it as beautiful and as distinctive as possible. What we showed at E3 ended up being different than what we launched with. And certainly what this iteration represents is our ongoing effort to leverage product design to make our innovations and products as attractive as possible.

We will continue to make ongoing adjustments and tweaks to our product design, always with the eye of the consumer in mind.

Does that mean we could probably expect a third iteration of the DS about 18 months from now?

I wouldn’t say that that’s an unreasonable assumption. Look at how many times we’ve improved on the Game Boy Advance in terms of the look, the feel, screen changes, and everything else. We believe that type of constant innovation is critical to driving this industry, and certainly if you look at the world wide sales of Game Boy Advance, I don’t think anyone would disagree.
Have you set a timetable for when the DS Lite will be available here in North America?

We have not announced the date and we won’t be announcing a date for the foreseeable future. We are working through our inventories and our allocations of product and frankly, we are doing everything we can just to meet current demand. Japan has already announced that they will launch in early March and they have the same challenges of meeting that very high level of demand.

We need to make sure that we have enough product in hand for us to launch effectively here in North America and as soon as we feel we are in that position we’ll announce it.

Do you think that announcing this new version so early, before it comes out, risks cannibalizing sales of the current DS?

Yeah, that is certainly a risk. But unfortunately it was a situation that couldn’t be helped in that our Japanese sales have been so strong, we’ve been out of stock essentially since the last few days in December. And that’s what drove us to announce the new design as early as we did so that we could let those consumers know that it was coming.

What sort of response have you gotten to the new Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection service for the Nintendo DS?

We feel the launch has gone spectacularly well. We launched Nintendo Wi-Fi connection with advertising that communicated the ease, the accessibility, and the match-up service that allowed consumers to play against people of their own skill level. The launch of Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection in the U.S., in Japan, and in Europe has been phenomenal. We are on track to break all types of records in terms of number of connections and number of unique users. And the software that we’ve launched is what’s driving really it.

The Tony Hawk title from Activision, our own Mario Kart DS, and Animal Crossing DS and we’re quite excited with the titles coming up. We’ve announced Metroid Prime: Hunters and Tetris DS, both WiFi compatible, both launching on the 20th of March. So we think we’ve launched extremely well, we’re quite happy with the numbers. And quite frankly, we’re prepared to bring out more and more titles to drive the service and ur objective is to get every single consumer to try Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection at least once, that’s our objective.

Now how do you respond to some of the criticisms of the service, like the lack of persistent friends?

Well, a couple of things. First the number of concerns or questions that have been raised by consumers who use the service are extremely modest. I mean we are talking hundredths of a percent of actual connections in terms of any consumers who are saying something negative about the service or the approach.

And the second point, in terms of having to have new friend codes for every game, quite frankly, what that does is put control in the hands of the gamer. So there are some people that I want to let into my house with Animal Crossing and others that I don’t, and that friend code set up allows me to manage that title by title. We think that’s the appropriate way to go.

Where is Nintendo right now with the development of the Revolution?

We have been sharing the controller mechanics with developers across the world. We have shipped over a thousand controller dev kits to developers so that they can begin getting experience with the controller mechanics. The response to the controller has been fantastic. Developers are truly embracing the innovation. They’re embracing the approach and quite frankly, they’re embracing our vision; our vision of creating games that are as sophisticated as the core gamer wants it to be but could also be as straightforward and ...