Howard Lincoln, chairman of Redmond, Washington-based Nintendo of America Inc said it is reasonable to project sales of 1m to 2m units of the company’s planned Ultra 64 game system in the 1995 holiday season – That’s if it’s a good product… if it’s a great product we’ll move a lot more, he told a media briefing here at the offices of the company; Lincoln said the new 64-bit Ultra 64 game system, being developed with Silicon Graphics Inc, is 65% complete and is on schedule to be launched in autumn 1995 at the company’s target retail price of $250 – but he declined to say whether that price would include a free game cartridge as Nintendo and other game makers have done in the past; he defended the company’s decision to go directly from the current 16-bit generation of games to the Ultra 64 system and to stick with game cartridges rather than switching to compact disks cs, but revealed that Nintendo also plans to launch a 32-bit product, the VR32, which Lincoln said will give users the first home virtual reality experience and will sell for under $200; Lincoln is also very optimistic about the balance of 1994 and 1995 in part because of a deep line-up of new 16-bit titles led by Donkey Kong Country; he also said sales of the hand-held Gameboy units remain strong, boosted by the new Super Game Boy adaptor; marketing vice-president Peter Main acknowledged that the company was short on popular new games last year for its core 16-bit Super Nintendo Entertainment System, and that contributed to a decline in the Kyoto, Japan-based parent company’s sales to $4,700m last fiscal from $6,200m the previous year.
