Harrison Calls Wii Rip-Off Talk Stupid
No matter what the temporal juxtaposition suggests.
To a lot of people, Sony's adding of motion sensors to the PlayStation 3 controller smacks of a rip-off of Nintendo's more convincing use of the technology in the Wii remote. The timing of the announcement, coming several months after Nintendo showed off the Wii controller at the Tokyo Game Show last September doesn't help. But according to Sony's Phil Harrison, the chatter is just "stupid".
"We have already worked on it a long time, and Nintendo has no doubt done likewise with something similar," Harrison told German newspaper Der Spiegel. "It is natural for two companies to work on identical devices. That's how it is with technology."
Harrison pointed out that Sony didn't cry foul when Nintendo started making 3D games in 1996 on the Nintendo 64, even though Sony had done that before when it put out the PlayStation nearly two years earlier.
And despite Nintendo's efforts to make a controller that anyone can pick up and play with, Harrison says Sony's Dual Analog controller remains the de-facto industry standard, simply by virtue of the overwhelming number of controllers out there - 400 million by his reckoning.
Alex Wollenschlaeger
Editor, Kikizo Games
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