Mega Man on Wii?

[A Black Falcon]

AMN: So do you suppose that Wii is SNK's current favorite next-gen console right now and will probably have the most support from SNK (relative to other systems)?

Ben Herman: It has the first support. Xbox 360 has been out for awhile but we haven’t brought out a title yet. PS3 is coming, and from our stand point as far as any games for it, they're coming later. So without question, Wii is coming out, we have a game for Wii and. . .you know it's certainly the first thing. . .so the first is usually. . . the first child is usually closest to your heart. But we do have some strong expectations that Sony will do very well. I'm sure Xbox 360 will continue to do well. The Wii, is just. . .the buzz at the show is very strong.

AMN: In Japan, they announced NeoGeo Battle Coliseum for the Xbox 360, quite awhile back. What's the status of that?

Ben Herman: Really right now it's on delay or on hold. The situation right now where obviously it was announced before 360 hit the Japanese market. Once again, Microsoft has not really impacted. As a matter of fact, the 360 has sold worse than the original Xbox. And that Xbox, ugly as it was, that big-black-brick, and as pretty as the 360 is. The 360 has not taken a foothold. Microsoft has been very good to the publishers, they've created some very incredible royalty opportunities, basically saying that there's no royalty payments to Microsoft and just build it. Some of the publishers have made some very attractive games in Japanese but it still has not sold. PS3 is coming, and certainly, even though it is very expensive. The reality is that the Japanese market will support Sony. I don't know what Microsft is going to do but a lot of publishers who have to invest lots of money to make the game are going to look at it and say, "well, I have the United States, I have Europe, and I have nothing---Japan." Whereas they are going to look at PS3 and say "I've got Japan, U.S.A., and Europe." If you've got to spend five or ten million dollars to develop a high-definition game, to be honest, you'd like to have one that can sell in all markets. So we're looking at it right now and we're saying, "What do we do with 360?" Live Arcade is something we're talking about. That still gets some of our older games available but yet that has been a little bit of a stumbling block because their base system, the memory capability is not strong enough to take some of our arcade classics. They want us to compress it. Maybe we can't compress it. They don't want to go to a memory stick that has 128 megs, they just feel like it's not fair to their consumer base because if they had only done the larger SKU, this wouldn't be a discussion. So their Live Arcade, which has got a lot of games presented, and they want to do a lot of games. . .there has been very little coming out because they have an issue with the memory capacity. We want to support Microsoft, but its been an interesting market. Xbox 360 is doing great here in the states, but it's not only about the U.S.. It's the world right now. But you know, Microsoft has got a beautiful new operating system - the Vista. I need a new laptop computer. I'm going to wait till a new OS comes out at the first of the year. You know, it's just might as well wait. At the same time Sony is going to have a great new system. It's backwards compatible 100%. Xbox 360 certainly isn't backwards compatible. Sony says that it will take all its PS2 games. People will step up to the PS3, hopefully they will have this wonderful new online environment that their creating. So they have a challenge, but they certainly feel that they're capable of competing with Microsoft. That's a war on one level and it's an expensive war.

Then you have Nintendo who finally added Wi-Fi, made it very accessible. Something that I think a lot of fans wanted. At the same time here comes a system that's very affordable. Doesn't require high-definition development. Doesn't require HDTV, so it's a no brainer, as a developer to make a Wii game because it's just inexpensive. And I just look at what they've done, or what they're trying to do, and they have really captured the imagination of older people who. . .look playing a new Mario game on a new Nintendo system is not going to get you 200 million new customers but Zelda is going to be interesting. And having Mario available and having assortment, instead of having six games at launch that they may have had with GameCube, we're talking about 20 + games. Now, as a third-party we're old enough to share in the opportunity. Everyone's not going to walk in and say "give me 25 games" on launch date. But they all have unique capabilities and unique qualities. And I'm willing to have a Metal Slug Anthology available, and I'll compete with anyone for retail dollars. It's my strongest franchise here in the United States and I'm not concerned at all about how it's going to fare against Madden or anyone else. If you want to play Metal Slug and you know it, for ten years, you're going to come get it. . .and I expect some tremendous sales for it. To me it's like, I go Wii Vs. "Them." Because I feel that Nintendo has its own niche, and I know they're going to do well and we all know why. The name or not. At the same time, let Microsoft and Sony go beat it out at the high-level. Now Microsoft does have a lead right now so Sony has a challenge.