Mario Galaxy, Wii details predicted in '91 by modern day Nostradamus

A lot of really good posts and I have to agree with #30. Considering Super Mario World came out in America in 1991 it's not that far of a stretch (not to sound "negative") to think that eventually there'd be a game called Super Mario Galaxy.

But I also agree with #13. The guys prediction of "There would be a miniature band inside that knew how to play any song!", is his most astounding prediction of them all. The fact that he described an actual band being inside a system, means he must've thought this was his most outlandish and impossible idea out of all of them. But now with the 360 the ability to play any song that has ever been put online is pretty crazy. The custom soundtracks found in both Xbox systems are something we take for granted, but must've been a crazy concept back in '91.

27 is not a lot of buttons!

Some PC games use over 104 buttons!!!

#26

The Atari 2600 was an 8-bit system.

I mean, unless you're looking at early computers, is there such a thing as a 4-bit console?

The early home pong systems might have used a 4-bit processor but I doubt it, even pong would be a tall order for those early cpu's, they were more likely analog. The early 80's games systems and the late 80's games systems both used the same cpu chips. The 2600, and the NES both used variants of the 6502. The sega master system and colecovision both used Z-80 chips.

In all cases the major differences was in support chips that handled the graphics, sound and memory addressing. As those got better the games got better.

Hey guys. If you didn't notice, if you decode the letter, you will find the letters Wii! in my letter!! Now I have to go and see the cryogenics people about freezing my body before the PS3 is released and crashes the stock market in 2007. opps let that slip sorry! Ignore that last sentence...

(and by the way, I really wish I was wrong and Nintendo went with the Bill and Ted Time traveling system!!)

Party On Dudes!!!!

Hey at least when Nintendo steals, it isn't as obvious as Sony. Sony steals from its competitors and manufacturers that can sue them for more than their game division is worth. Nintendo steals from 10 year old kids from the past.

"Quote from http://wii.nintendo.com/hardware.html: 'It also will be home to new games conceived by indie developers whose creativity is larger than their budgets.'"


Hey if any of you are tech savvy enough... maybe that cow milking game would become a possibility

No, the Colecovision was not in any sense a "32-bit" system, technically or otherwise. It was a Z80-based 8-bit system, with no coprocessors of any kind and a video architecture that required you to send graphics to the frame buffer 1 byte at a time.

The Intellivision, on the other hand, used a 16-bit CPU but 10-bit memory. And while it could display a lot more things on the screen at once as the Atari, it had the same resolution, fewer colors, and the processor was actually slower. That's why the Intellivision is always lumped into the 8-bit generation rather than being hailed as the first 16-bit console.

But man, when it came out I promise you we were all drooling over it the way people are drooling over the Wii (or the PS3, before E3) nowadays. Atari games were fun but this was "intelligent television", whatever that was supposed to mean.

Anyway, I hope that if Nintendo doesn't track down that Jimmy guy and give him a free Wii, one of the gaming sites will. Especially if he's not into games anymore since that's part of Wii's target audience.

Hahaha, he got lucky there for sure, for someone pulling numbers out of their ass. He probably got 512 from various other systems having 512kb of memory (or 512kilobit carts) or a 512 colour pallete... the other numbers were just made up on the spot... as you do when you're that age. Lucky, but not a prophet. How many others of us might have done similar "inventing" back in the day (though maybe without being big headed enough to send the result to a magazine) and can see similarities today? Lots, because the people making the "eerily similar" products were the same kids, just they ended up being in a position in the industry where they had enough influence to get their vision built.

Other thoughts...
Does this mean I can get some comeback for, on various baking hot but rather dull spanish beaches in the early 90s, inventing (and even making flat cardboard prototypes) of the palmpilot, the blackberry, multimedia phones, the gameboy advance, SP and DS, and ebook/(video) ipod? All I did was take current things at the time and project them into the future along what was at the time a well established but fairly gentle curve of advancement (the massive pressing of an electronic fast-forward button in the mid 90s being impossible to predict). Therefore they had such things as a "lightning fast" 200mhz 128-bit intel 786 cpu (or, i think, it was a motorola 68090?), an unbelievable 32mb RAM, a super slim floppy drive that could read 4mb discs, and an enormously capable MIDI playback chip that could also handle samples if you asked it nicely. And a 480x360, 32768 colour screen. It all folded up into the size of a credit card and the thickness of a chocolate bar. Not too far from the truth, if you tweak things to allow for the development of flash memory and micro-sized hard discs (at the time, HDs were enormous external boxes, unless you had an equally super sized PC rather than e.g. an Amiga), mp3s and the pentium-fuelled processor and memory speed/size/bandwidth wars. Oh, and the high speed adoption of 24 bit capability in video cards, mpg decoding, and 3d capabilities. Nothing that even Jimmy foresaw - he probably thought this system would play the best looking 2D platformer version of mario ever, and a really rather special version of starfox as well, looking at least twice as good as on the SNES... so good it's almost like being in virtual reality!

Remember the Atari ST, Mac Classic, Amiga, and Megadrive/Genesis were all technically 32bit machines, or would have been had they ever been supplied with a proper 32bit memory controller rather than a 16bit one suited to the chips of the time - but, despite being surprisingly versatile and classic machines, their raw processing power is marginal. And both the intel 386 and motorola 030 were introduced in the mid 80s. 32 bits is nothing. It's what you do with it that counts.

Isn't the Playstation 2 based on a 128bit CPU? That's always what I've heard up to this point. And remember what the nintendo console BEFORE the gamecube was? Right, the N-64... hands up can anyone tell me what the 64 is for? 512bits wouldn't have seemed unfeasible to a kid who didn't know what the terminology truly represented. (Having more than 64 is still usable, as you can use them as parallel data access pipes to either reach multiple addresses at once or speed up serial transfer... i think the latest PC memory, and certainly that in video cards, is 256 bit? 512 would be blazingly fast)

Lalalala
I forgot my last point
But I think I've made my main thrust clear :)

Remembered my last point:
Emulation has been round for donkeys years; The Colecovision had a cartridge that allowed you to run 2600 VCS titles on it, and my old Atari ST had CP/M, IBM PC, Macintosh, Sinclair ZX81 and Spectrum emulators available, amongst several others now forgotten. And a good choice of easy to learn programming languages too, with which I wrote some games (awful ones, even when using the "programming for dummies" Shoot-Em-Up Construction Kit), and other guys actually compiled and published theirs (many good titles came out of a copy of STOS Basic and it's powerful compiler).

None of the stuff he writes about is all too revolutionary or unpredictable by a whole bunch of kids, particularly if you hit rewind and put yourself into that time. He was probably pissed off that his NES / SNES didn't come with a programming language cartridge and a little keyboard accessory when most other home computers / consoles of the day had that capability (including stuff as tacky as the Atari 400 and Colecovision).

It's just that a fair amount of what was common to him is now unknown and coming back around, it seems to smack us in the face as "how the hell could he have predicted that?"