It all start­ed in the mid­dle of last month. Ru­mours sprung up of a planned price drop for Nin­ten­do's Wii gam­ing con­sole, prompt­ing many to spec­u­late that the Japan­ese com­pa­ny would be an­nounc­ing a suc­ces­sor to the pop­u­lar de­vice at this year's E3 trade show. It wasn't long af­ter that the spec­u­la­tion turned to ru­mour: yes, a "Wii 2" an­nounce­ment would in­deed be com­ing at E3. The talk picked up from there, with every­thing from the planned re­lease date to hard­ware spec­i­fi­ca­tions be­ing hint­ed at, but Nin­ten­do kept qui­et. That si­lence has been bro­ken and the word is now of­fi­cial.

The next next-gen war has be­gun. The fact of the un­re­leased con­sole's ex­is­tence is all that the com­pa­ny is will­ing to talk about right now. A terse press re­lease states: "Nin­ten­do has de­cid­ed to launch in 2012 a sys­tem to suc­ceed Wii...We will show a playable mod­el of the new sys­tem and an­nounce more spec­i­fi­ca­tions at the E3 Ex­po, which will be held June 7-9, 2011, in Los An­ge­les." Wii 2, con­firmed. Some of the more re­cent talk presents some tan­ta­liz­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties for Nin­ten­do's plans mov­ing in­to the next con­sole gen­er­a­tion. Hard­ware-wise, the sys­tem will be de­signed to at least com­pete with - if not sur­pass - the ca­pa­bil­i­ties of the Xbox 360 and PlaySta­tion 3. That means high def out­put and the abil­i­ty to run the same mul­ti-plat­form re­leas­es that come to the oth­er two con­soles.

There's al­so word on a rather unique in­no­va­tion for the sys­tem's con­trol schemes. The Wii's mo­tion con­trols will re­turn, though it's un­clear if this means to­tal­ly new hard­ware, sup­port for Wii pe­riph­er­als or a mix of the two. There's al­so go­ing to be a more tra­di­tion­al gamepad, with twin ana­log thumb­sticks, eight but­tons and so on. It seems that this con­troller will al­so fea­ture a few in­no­va­tions, no­tably adding in a cam­era and a 6.2-inch touch­screen. Giv­en all of this, Nin­ten­do pre­sum­ably hopes to win back the core gam­ing au­di­ence while con­tin­u­ing to pro­mote the fam­i­ly-friend­ly ap­peal that has made the Wii so pop­u­lar.

Adam Rosen­berg