Revolution name speculation

Speculation prior to Satoru Iwata's keynote last night focused on whether the Nintendo pres would announce the "real" name of Revolution - and though he obviously didn't, there's some questionable evidence floating around that Nintendo's close to doing so.

Yesterday, tech blog Engadget got hold of something purporting to be a photograph of a slide shown at a Nintendo presentation - a bluey cube-like concoction formed out of opposing d-pads hovering above the name "Nintendo Go". Later on, they got hold of a photo of what looked like a brochure bearing the same logo and name.

Since then there's been all sorts of chatter - people have pointed out that "go" is Japanese for "five", and that this will be Nintendo's fifth console; some have focused on the snatches of Japanese text creeping in on the right of the photograph, which apparently include terms like "brand" and so on; others still have compared the logo to those of the N64 and GameCube and found a kind of loose correlation, and remarked on the way a cube is formed by the way the d-pads interlock, and that Revolution will Cube games too.

On the other hand, people have pointed out that Nintendo has a growing habit of sticking with its codenames - even though it continues to refer to them as such, as it did in the literature that accompanied Iwata's keynote last night. Nintendo DS is a recent example of this, while "N64" was originally the Japanese name for the console and later become the global brand.

Of course, the only real voice that matters on the subject is Nintendo's, and Nintendo isn't saying anything - anything, that is, above and beyond what Satoru Iwata said on Thursday about the company's plans to "disrupt console gaming" in the near future.