Shake that tree, shake it and watch the Nintendo executives fall out and everything end up like people said it would. The latest person in the Nintendo executive culling is Beth Llewelyn, senior director of corporate communications at Nintendo of America, as she officially resigned today. Not only that, but Golin Harris' Julia Roether, guru of Nintendo's PR company in the States, also peaced-out. That sound you hear is Nintendo's PR department running around without a head. We now wait to hear Perrin Kaplan's exit cue.

Although some less-than-charitable things can be said about the way Nintendo's PR was run up to this point, it could simply be the same issues as Sony had to deal with taking orders from Japan. Sony of America was starting to turn things around with Dave Karraker, but then he left after less than a year (we really miss Dave). We now wait and see who the replacements are. Will it be business as usual, or will Nintendo's PR alter dramatically?

We told you this would be going down at the end of July, now it seems it's finally happened: George Harrison, head of U.S. marketing for Nintendo, is leaving the company, effective at the end of the year. Harrison confirmed the news with Reuters, saying "I have confirmed to all employees that I will be leaving at the end of December and not making the move to California."

Though he stopped short of giving a reason, it was rumored in June that Harrison and other Nintendo VPs would be leaving the company to avoid moving from Washington to Nintendo PR's new homes in San Fransisco and New York. What's still unclear is what Harrison will be doing after he leaves the company, but after heading up marketing for a product that a couple of people have heard of, we doubt he'll have much trouble finding a gig.

[Via CVG]

Hot on the heels that the Big N is looking for someone to fill a top marketing position, GameDaily BIZ is reporting that George Harrison, a senior Nintendo VP, will be retiring from the company, though he will help transition the sales and marketing team from Redmond to New York.

According to "an industry source at a major publisher," Harrison, the Senior Vice President of Marketing and Corporate Communications for Nintendo, distributed a voice message at the company revealing his "early retirement." At this point, GameDaily is unsure if that means a retirement just from the House of Mario, or from games all together. Some of you may remember that Harrison's departure (along with Kaplan's and Beth Llewelyn's) was rumored by Game Informer in June. We wish the departing Harrison all the best.

Nintendo marketing exec. George Harrison says the Game Boy name may be put to rest. The DS has been been successful enough that the company no longer needs to depend on the Game Boy brand name for future products. We always did wonder what happened to the next Game Boy.

Harrison tells GameDaily.biz, "It's hard to say in the future if we will ever bring back the Game Boy trademark." And so a name synonymous with many gamer's childhoods is buried. Oh well, it's not like the DS name has hurt Nintendo's bottom line.

Curiously, Harrison also said Nintendo's WiiWare could be out in 2007. Actually the quote is kinda in reverse order. Harrison says, "It may not take until 2008. I've seen a couple of ideas that have already been generated even before we went public [with WiiWare]. Whether those are going to be ready or not, I don't really know." So, it pretty much hinges if the developers get their stuff in order. Only the next six months will tell who gets their WiiWare out first -- the quality of those games is a whole other issue.

Well, obviously. George Harrison, Nintendo's senior VP of marketing and corporate communications, has rubbished a claim that Nintendo is intentionally constricting Wii supplies in order to bolster their next fiscal year, beginning April 1. This comes in response to Gamestop's chief operating officer, Dan DeMatteo, who opined yesterday that Nintendo had "intentionally dried up supply because they made their numbers for the year."

"No, that's not at all the case," says Harrison in a phone call to Next Generation. The Nintendo executive goes on to explain that it's simply a matter of competition amongst Wii territories, with Japan and Europe being just as desperate for stock. "People in Japan at NCL [Nintendo Co. Ltd.] are making the best decisions that they can about which products get shipped to which market and when." Of course, whether or not said decisions are "best" for consumers or for Nintendo's financial records is up for debate.

The argument against managed scarcity has always been that making more consoles means making more money (duh!), though this critically underestimates the value of "buzz" and the strange culture that has formed around supposedly scarce items. Already, there's an impression among many that the European PS3 launch was a "failure", simply because the system failed to sell out and attain a level of unattainability. Increasing supply may net Nintendo more profits in the short run, but what sort of gain can you associate with being in the headlines? The Wii has already snagged two headlines in the last two days because it's notably in short supply, not because it's readily available and doing well.

Managed scarcity does also not mean drying up the supply completely. Nintendo can sell a boatload of Wii's while still stopping short of satisfying demand and losing that hard-to-find status. If the company does decide to open the floodgates next month, they'll have lost nothing -- and the NPD sales results will show as much. Until then, just keep on asking for that Wii, implies Harrison. "Every retailer would want to have more [Wiis]. I think [DeMatteo's comments] may have been GameStop's way of trying to request more."

Nintendo certainly struck the jackpot with their little dual-screened device, didn't they? With 21 million DS units having been sold worldwide, you can bet that the Japanese giant is enjoying every last penny spilling forth from the one-armed consumer. In the celebratory press release, Nintendo points out that what they've accomplished in under two years easily trumps the 1 million iPods Apple shifted in 19 months. Apparently, that equates to 23 DS systems sold per minute ever since the November 2004 launch.

As you may vengefully recall, we accused Nintendo of having suspiciously puffy sleeves in our last game of marketing poker. You'll be happy to learn then that there are no such shenanigans here and that the numbers check out based on a 24-hour business day. We suspect that if the day were any longer, Nintendo would make such a huge amount of money that they'd be taken into a back room, sternly questioned by Joe Pesci and ... this casino allegory is going nowhere.