Hrm. We’ll have to wait and see. I know that it wont hurt Revolution sales though if it’s free. Hell, if they can price the Revolution at a good price, offer free retro gaming and have good marketing and a solid launch title, they will do very good.

It’s not entirely hard to do well. Look at the GameCube. Purple console for US launch, non-mario launch title and this is years after a strong PS2 and Dreamcast involvement.

Nintendo indeed means business.

I was betting on a point system. Asin, you buy software and get a certain ammount of points and you can claim old games with said points. To avoid people not buying revolution games.

Its good to see things for free, but i hope people dont just take advantage of Nintendo.

Nick, I think Daily Radar jumped to conclusions based on Harrison’s interview with Gamespot…I read the same interview, and he did not specifically state that game downloads would be free…he did not discount it either, but said specifically the pricing structure was not yet decided.

DailyRadar, as a news site, should have read the article more carefully.

Yeah Nick… that dummy article i submitted was about this… and I took it off when I realized that DailyRadar simply misread the GameStop article. Here’s hoping its true though…

Hmm, I dont know. Games Radar is basically the online site for Edge Magazine. Their info has always been pretty reliable. However, this is always a chance that this is a mistake. I guess we will see.

Hmmm…. I’m cautious. I’ll wait until Gamespots Rumour articel tomorrow. It’s just that it seems odd. Although they could gradually release the old games… hmmm… I’m not sure…

It’s a misinterpretation of the Gamestop article.

If this was the real deal it feels like we’d be seeing it on a number of the formal non-blog news sites (ign, gamestop, 1up).

wheres the gamespot interview?

the interview on gamespot was a day before the gamesradar article and the gamespot interview says they don’t know if they will sell them.

I, in a way, hope that the games aren’t free. If I have to pay or collect points from buying Revolution games then I think I’ll appreciate the retro games a whole lot more. Otherwise I’ll just mess about with them for five minutes and then leave them alone.

Yeah, I went straight to the source after reading that story on Joystiq. It was suggestive at best, and certainly not “confirmed”. Randy, if you haven’t already found it, the original GameSpot article is at:
http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/05/26/news_6126595.html

Here’s what was said:

GS: Do you plan on having like a per-download pricing model along the lines of the microtransactions that will be used in the next-gen Xbox marketplace?

GH: Well, we can use it in a variety of ways. We’ve used some of the older games already as little bonuses, either as bonus gifts or hidden in levels of games. Certainly for the first-party titles we’ll be making some of those available. We haven’t really talked about whether we would sell them. The third parties can make their own decision whether they want to sell them, or maybe they will add it on as sort of a free benefit when you buy a current version of the game.

I think Ninty will make much of their first party games available for free and everyone else can offer there’s for a fee if they want. Kinda like the NDS online plans.
My biggest hope for this online game dealing plan is that maybe people will start making new games for the legacy systems that we can get straight from the Rev. Seriously, I would buy so much more “new old” games then current gen games.

I think they will be “free” in the way that they come will your revolution games and maybe on holiday downloads. remember how animal crossing made collecting nes games a scavenger hunt kind-o-thing. The thing I’m most ahappy about is the new games we might see because of this, since making homebrew nes games is so easy. Now this is going to be “Retro Gaming 2000″!

Thats great, I know what im downloading
Super mario3 and All The Zeldas

What I was thinking is that maybe using points earned in first party games, eg. SSB or StarFox, (both hopefully online, so that just playing the game earns you points), gamers could turn those into coins, which could be used to “purchase” some classic games, such as SSB64 or StarFox 1 or 2 for the Snes. In short, it would be similar to the Trophy system in SSBM.

Not to alienate people, perhaps every day, one would recieve a small amount of coins, such as enough to buy a NES game after half a week and also have some games which don’t require coins to be used as payment.

This way, it would still cause new software to be bought while still emphasizing the ultra backwards compatibility.

Has anyone considered the possibility of additional content? What about all those other SMB 3 levels no one got to play because you needed the e-reader and cards?

I really doubt that all of the first party material will be free.. there’s just too much money to be made.

It’s not weird that I kind of, uh, WANT them to cost money… is it? I’d feel a lot better about getting a bunch of games if they were like, at the least, a buck a game.

Edge magazine has their own site, and it’s not Games Radar - http://www.edge-online.co.uk/

From that article it doesn’t look like anything is decided, I don’t know where they got the free games idea from.

What if Nintendo decided to use classics as an incentive to buy new games–like if you buy a new Rev game you get two free downloads or something. That’d be smart.