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Mark Rein on Wii once again

by rawmeatcowboy
22 September 2006
GN 1.0 / 2.0

A portion of a CVG interview with Mark Rein…

CVG: Before we finish up: did Epic ever get that Wii dev kit?

Mark Rein: (laughs) I can’t say, I’m under NDA with Nintendo. But I can tell you that we’re not doing, internally any development right now on the Wii. The Wii I’m sure is going to be a fantastic machine and sell really well but it’s kind of below - it’s not Intel integrated graphics but it’s pretty far bellow the kind of min-bar of Unreal Engine 3. If you built a PC with that spec it wouldn’t really be capable of playing an Unreal Engine 3 games decently. They’re aiming at clearly at different audience that what we are. You know, Unreal Engine 3 can’t run on Xbox 1 or PS2 either - and that’s not to say that some of our licensees wont find a way to shoe-horn it into that platform, we certainly have some licensees that are doing some experiments in that area and it could very well happen. But that’s a really tough job. And one thing that has become public knowledge in the last little while is that Ubisoft’s game Red Steel is using Unreal Engine 2, so there will be Unreal Engine games on the Wii. There will be Unreal Engine games on the Wii and hopefully they’ll be successful and maybe we’ll make a little money from it, but Unreal Engine 3 - that’s a little below our target platform.

CVG: Do you think the Wii will be able to emulate the success of the DS?

Mark Rein: They certainly have a lot of buzz right now and if they can have a low enough price (NOTE: our interview was conducted before Nintendo’s recent price announcement)- you know, people compare the DS and the PSP but the DS is half the price of the PSP, It’s going for a different market than the PSP almost and so maybe that’s the difference between Wii and PlayStation 3 or Wii and Xbox 360. Maybe they’re going to come out at a significantly lower price point and they’ll be able to do some really cool stuff with it, we’ll have to wait and see. Or wait and Wii (laughs).

I honestly don’t know how to feel about those statements. They go back and forth from being positive to condescending. At least, that is how I see them.