Nintendo Announces The DS’s Successor, The 3DS

By Andrew Liszewski

By now you’ve probably already heard that last night Nintendo spilled the beans on the successor to their immensely popular DS portable gaming system. Well, spilled the beans maybe isn’t best way to describe their announcement about it, more like just cracking open the can and letting us have a whiff of what’s inside. In fact, here’s the extent of what they ‘announced’ regarding the new Nintendo 3DS.

Nintendo Co., Ltd.(Minami-ward of Kyoto-city, President Satoru Iwata) will launch “N intendo 3D S”(temp) during the fiscal year ending March 2011, on which games can be enjoyed with 3D effects without the need for any special glasses.

“Nintendo 3DS”(temp) is going to be the new portable game machine to succeed “Nintendo DS series”, whose cumulative consolidated sales from Nintendo amounted to 125million units as of the end of December 2009, and will include backward compatibility so that the software for Nintendo DS series, including the ones for Nintendo DSi, can also be enjoyed.

We are planning to announce additional details at E3 show, which is scheduled to be held from June 15, 2010 at Los Angeles in the U.S.

At this point all we can do is speculate on what the system will look like and how it will work, but no one had really predicted any kind of 3D being part of the new system’s functionality, even though it’s all the rage now. Of course given Nintendo’s history with 3D gaming systems, I’m going to try and remain cautiously optimistic about the 3DS, but so far I’ve yet to come across a glasses-free 3D display that didn’t leave me feeling woozy after just a few minutes. So here’s to hoping Nintendo has something really revolutionary up their sleeves while we count down the days until E3.

[ PR – Launch of New Portable Game Machine ] VIA [ Kotaku ]