Nintendo had an admittedly poor showing at E3 this year. Wii Music did not go over well, the WiiMotion Plus was met with head scratching and questions like ’why wasn’t this done right in the first place,’ and many people thought they simply made fools of themselves.

Now this week it’s been reported that Nintendo is hard at work on the next iteration of its console series, but no one knows what it is.

Well I don’t know what it is either, this is just speculation, what if and prognostication and those that know me know I do not have a great track record when telling the future, though I did call Wiiware accurately.

A Logical Step?

Nintendo cannot rush out a new platform. It’s just not good business to put out a platform then put out a new, improved platform shortly after thereby screwing the people that bought the first one. Well unless you’re Apple apparently who can do all kinds of things that make marketing people cringe.

So what is Nintendo hard at work on? I’ll tell you what I think they might be working on. What I think they might be working on is a snap-on power-booster.

ATI built the "Hollywood" graphics processor in the Wii. They have also built a multiple graphics card system called Crossfire. Oh, now you see don’t you?

It would definitely be some engineering to make it viable but it’s not impossible. The Wii is so small already that many people wouldn’t object to dropping say $100 on an add-on that snaps onto the back of the unit, not unlike the highly unnecessary intercoolers that are on the market, and boosts the processing and graphics power of the Wii to say...near Xbox 360 quality.

Right now all the rage are the multi-core CPUs, dual-core, quad-core...so what’s to stop Nintendo from going the multi-core way and simply having the cores separated by their physical location? Well as I mentioned it would be a fair amount of engineering for one. It would also require some custom built parts that are going to need to be researched and developed and it would take some fancy operating system shenanigans to basically create a multi-processor OS that could share that load between internal CPU and GPU and external or snap-on CPU and GPU.

While they’re at it they might even address the so-called ’storage problem’ on the Wii by slapping in a 32GB solid-state drive. Voila! No more graphics, processing or storage "problems." Give it a couple of backside USB ports and well…the Wii gets an extra 5 year lifecycle boost in my opinion.

A Somewhat Illogical Step?

Speaking of multi-core, that’s another option for the Nintendo R&D team. Call the Wii an extremely successful concept or experiment and build from it. Take the CPU and replace it with a multi-core. Take the GPU and do the same. Or better yet as I heard at GDC Paris 08, slap them together. Combine the CPU and GPU and make them both dual, or quad-core units.

Now you’re playing with power, as the old advertisements said (when was the last time you heard that?). It could be the Wii Plus One. Double the power, double the graphics, quadruple the fun.

This is and is not illogical. It would risk alienating consumers who purchased the Wii but it could work to pull in a new more hardcore gaming audience as well. Imagine the Wii but with top-of-the-line PC processing and graphics. Now you’ve got a machine that’s fun for everyone and has the ability to pump out the polygons and shade those cells with the best of the best. I won’t even speak about the lighting effects potential.

One Large Step for Nintendo

There is of course the long road. Nintendo could scrap the whole Wii architecture and move forward with a completely new design. With the popularity of the Wii and the hand-over-fist piles of cash that they’re hauling in, they can definitely start looking at the 5-year story arc. They can ride the high tide of Wii love right into the next decade with nary a problem.

But I think they’ve realized that while they did bring the family together in the living room enjoying games together they’re going to need to do something more for the next generation.

That ’more’ is going to be a logical progression of graphics and power. It’s going to be multimedia features like Blu-Ray (never going to happen due to the dislike between Sony and Nintendo that goes way back) or whatever the next generation of high capacity media will be.

Can they once again reinvent the game controller? Probably not, but they might be able to expand on what they built this time around. I have long called for strap on ankle, wrist, head and hand controllers. We don’t want to always hold those Wii Remotes (no not Weemotes) so why not take all the parts and put them into flexible housing that can really give a fighting game some POP. You Kick your character kicks, you punch your character punches…you dodge a red rubber ball, well you get the picture.

Far-reaching Vision

Of course all of this is highly speculative. Developers are just settling into the long haul development cycle of this generation of gaming consoles and none of them are hoping for a new generation to start popping up anytime soon. The 8th generation is a long way off yet. The children that are the 7th generation are still having tantrums and fits of rage and aren’t even mature yet to completely stand on their own. So it will be some time before the next generation consoles come around which means we still have years of speculation.

Anyone would be a fool to think that Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo get a generation of consoles ready and then sit back and close down R&D. The recent reports of Nintendo working on the next platform should have been met with cries of "DUH!" and not raised eyebrows and "Oh really?!"

More interesting would have been reports of Nintendo looking at ways to strengthen and lengthen the life of their current platform to give it a power boost or added compatibility and features. Actually, if reports of any of the big three working on that would come out of the pipe, I just might not even be surprised, after all, I did just suggest Nintendo might be doing just that now didn’t I?