Satoru Iwata's keynote was a blast. The head of Nintendo took the stage to thunderous applause from an overflowing house of attendees. Seriously, people were standing all over the place and there wasn't an empty seat to be found except to the extreme left and right of the stage, and not that many even in that case. Iwata-san began his talk by indentifying the strategy that Nintendo has been pursuing these past few years - disruption. And to exemplify this model he turned to none other than Pepsi, who he said asked the question "what else do people want to drink?". According to Iwata the industry is ripe for disruption.

Iawat's first topic of the morning was the Nintendo DS, and talking about how they disrupted the handheld industry with it, and namely with the game Brain Age (US title). This game was something that came from reading a book on training your mind. Iwata met with the author for one hour the day the DS was launched, the only time the author had available, in order to sell him on this game concept. The meeting ended up lasting three hours and involved using a Nintendo employee for actual testing, the lab rat had to put on a cranium hat so his brain usage could be measured as he played the game. In order to demonstrate, Bill Trinen, the Localization Manager for Nintendo EA, came on stage and actually played the game, which they showed on the screen thanks to an overhead camera and a digital link from the DS to the production crew, who threw it up on the screen. After showing off the game's features and how it makes use of the DS' handwriting and voice recognition, Bill called up a few opponents, including Will Wright and Jamil Moledina, to join him on the stage for some co-op play. Not directly, since the game isn't WiFi, but they just started the games at the same time. The game was simple math problems (6x4, 16-7, 4+8) popping up and you have to use the stylus to enter in the correct answer as fast as you can.

Iwata's next topic was the Nintendo WiFi, and how they developed the system, focusing on the goal of making it seamless to connect to people both right next to you and on the other side of the world, recognizing as well that making it easier for the users makes it harder for the developers. Hence the dubbed it Prohect Houseparty, since they envisioned you wanting to invite people over to play DS in your living room. NiWiFi already sports over 1 million users and it's been available for only four months. To showcase this wireless connectivity Bill once again took the stage to demo Metroid Prime Hunters, which was just recently released. He invited onto the stage a designer, artist and programmer from the development team for some deathmatch. Yea he got butchered. After Bill left the stage Iwata played a video announcing the imminent release of a new DS title - The Legend of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass. It was freakin awesome. I'm probably going to buy a DS Lite just for this game.

Finally, Iwata talked about the Revolution, and how they've been trying for the last two years to come up with something... well, revolutionary. Their main focus from the beginnig was how people were really comfortable picking up a TV remote, but not a game controller. Therefore they wanted four things in their new system:

• Wireless
• Approachable for anyone
• Sophisticated enough for hardcore gamers
• Revolutionary

After 6 months of development involving more than fifteen people they came up with the one-handed controller concept, mainly thanks to Shigeru Miyamoto asking about playing a game with just one hand. They took this to the Metroid Prime guys and they immediately turned the design down on the basis that they couldn't apply it to their game, a first-person shooter. So that's when they developed the additional joystick you can attach to the main controller and use with your other hand when you need it. After talking about the Revolution controller, Iwata touched on the virtual console concept, revealing that in addition to Nintendo titles, titles from SEGA and Hudson Games will also be available. Also, Iwata compared the virtual console to Apple's iTunes store, which begs the obvious question - does that mean the virtual console will become a vessel to allow Nintendo to distribute indie titles? Nothing specific was said about this but it was hinted at.

A Nintendo fan out on the march	The stage
The video kits that put the DS on the bigscreen	Nick Smolney and Mike Sweeney pass the time with their DS' along with many other attendees
A packed Civic Auditorium	Satoru Iwata
Bill Trinen	Bill gives an overview of the brain training
The contestants get ready	Will thinks it's going to be easy
Will Wright's pretty smart (far left screen) but not the smartest	The WiFi team wanted to come but Iwata said "Sorry, no" and so they wrote a message
Metroid Prime Hunters DS	The deathmatch is under way
Shot in haste and surprise - sorry for the shakiness	The Legend of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass
Early Revolution controller designs	The final design