Weiird: Heckler Chris Hecker says Wii a piece of s***, then retracts

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Friday, 09 March 2007 21:19

Your IT - Entertainment

Chris Hecker from Maxis slammed the Wii as excrement in a panel discussion called ‘Burning Mad’ on the topic of ‘Fear of a Wii Planet’, but retracts and apologizes the next day.

While Chris Hecker may well have been pulling our collective legs with his blatant attack on the Nintendo Wii yesterday, attendees at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) were left in no doubt today that he had suddenly changed his mind, with speculation growing as to whether or not his superiors wanted it made known that Hecker’s views were his alone, and not those of Maxis, who is releasing a game called Spore for the Nintendo DS later this year.

Hecker originally opened his GDC speech by saying that “The Wii is a piece of s***!”. He then described the Wii as two GameCubes stuck together with duct tape, and accused it of being ‘severely underpowered’, not simply because of a basic graphics capability compared with the Xbox 360 and the PS3, but also because the processor is likewise not as powerful as its competitors. He also said that “It's not clear to me that Nintendo gives a s*** about games as an art form" and accused Nintendo of only wanting to make ‘fun’ games.

He then ended by asking Nintendo to take games more seriously as an ‘art’, and “make a console that doesn't suck ass”.

Of course, with Nintendo’s legendary designer Shigeru Miyamoto responsible for some of the best and most loved games of all time, Hecker’s heckle was totally off the mark and certainly uncalled for, and almost instantly made the global gaming news circuit, largely derided as an appalling attack on arguably the world’s most loved ‘new’ games console.

Today, Hecker issued an apology. He said that “I don't know who has read the internet, yesterday. In a [unintelligible] panel I said a bunch of things. I was trying to be thought provoking and entertaining and fun and a lot of the stuff went too far over the top—on the entertaining and fun side, so that it was no longer thought provoking, just inflammatory. And in the process I hurt a bunch of people I care about. And so, I want to apologize now.
When I'm on stage, I'm me. I'm talking talk from me. From me. I'm not representing EA or Maxis”.

He continued that “I want to make two things perfectly clear. I do not think the Wii is a piece of shit. Nintendo needs to be applauded for trying to interface on the controller front, the user interface front, on making games accessible, on making a console that you don't need to mortgage your house to afford.”

He ended his apology by saying that “Secondly, it's totally obvious—and I'm sorry that I implied otherwise—that everyone at Nintendo is passionate at making great games. Some of the games give me hope that we will be seen as an art form on par with movies and books”.

The US public might accuse some of their politicians of being ‘flip-floppers’, but surely this has to be the biggest gaming flip-flop of all time, and simply exposes some very foolish actions and next-day backpedalling at warp speed factor 10.
Ironically for Hecker, his heckle has brought out all of the Wii’s supporters in condemning his initial remarks, with his apology, although welcome, seen by some as ‘too little, too late’.

For the Wii, Hecker comments are like water off a duck’s back, and the Wii will continue to do very well in 2007, especially as new games arrive, against and despite as big an onslaught as both Microsoft and Sony can muster, as the world consumers say ‘Don’t worry, Wii… wii love you!’.