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Now that it’s fairly well established that the Nintendo Wii is going to be awesome, I’ve been thinking about what changes we might see over the Wii’s life cycle. Revised versions of consoles launching a few years into the life cycle have become somewhat expected; even the venerable Nintendo and Super Nintendo both had late revisions as they moved into the budget category at the end of their lives. The revised slimline PS2 was actually hard to come by when it launched, although both the Slimline PS2 and the Gamecube v2 actually had less functionality than their original models. The revised PS2 dropped compatibility for the poorly-supported hard disk attachment, although it included an ethernet port that the original lacked, while the revised Gamecube actually dropped the digital a/v out port.

Interestingly, Nintendo dropped the digital port — required to play gamecube games at their highest resolution — for cost-cutting reasons, although they quietly offer to replace your digital-portless-gamecube with one from their private stockpile if you bought a gamecube expecting to get component video out of it. So, those two revisions could both be considered downgrades.

There haven’t really been any upgraded console revisions yet; from one perspective, releasing a revised console with better features is a great way to piss off anyone who bought the previous revision, and it’s not good to fragment the universal compatibility of a console and its software, which is still a big edge over PC gaming. However, Nintendo has shown that substantial hardware revisions can be successful; some of your most hardcore fans might even buy a new one just to get that new feature. The catch is that Nintendo has restricted this practice to the handheld space so far. From the Gameboy to the Gameboy Color, from the Gameboy Advance to the Gameboy Advance SP, and now from the DS to the DS lite, these have all been successful — but not insubstantial — revisions to established hardware platforms, some even creating forks in the software market that might have seemed inadvisable.

One of the big arguments about the Wii back before the excitement about the software had begun to build was that it would be the only console in this next generation that had no support for HD television resolutions. It was such a frissom, even among the fanboy faithful, that I remember being incited to send a contact us email to Nintendo complaining about their decision, which I wouldn’t usually do. While it’s now more clear that Wii isn’t really intended to be competitive with the next generation at all, the fact remains that many potential Wii buyers (myself included) have invested in HD displays, and we don’t even decide what to have for lunch without thinking about if it would look better in HD. I don’t think that HD support is a dealbreaker in any way for the potential Wii buyer who just wants to play Super Mario Galaxy, but you combine these early-adopter market dynamics with Nintendo’s established upgrade habits, and I think there’s a possibility that we may someday see a Wii-HD as an upgraded model with HDMI out and support for HD resolutions.

Nintendo has also shown that you can introduce new hardware features midway through a products life cycle without creating true software compatibilty problems; look at the Gameboy / Gameboy Color transition, where titles started supporting both formats, with color only available on the properly equipped units, of course. HD could just be one of those little icons on the back of the game case that shows what peripherals the game is compatible with and how many players can play at once, etc.

I think the market success of the Wii will make the business case for a Wii-HD, maybe in 2008 when sales are really starting to hit their stride and HD is that much further along the adoption curve. Let’s face it, all us launch day saps will line up all over again just to see Monkey Ball in 1080p, won’t we?